POZNÁMKY K VÝSKUMU POPULÁRNEJ LITERATÚRY V STREDOEURÓPSKOM KULTÚRNOM KONTEXTE

The article maps current issues concerning popular literature in Central European cultures with a special emphasis on the Hungarian, Slovak, Czech and Polish contexts. It provides a partial overview of the current state of art and of the research approaches and outlines comparative perspectives. The research of popular literature and culture is done either from the inside, i.e. from the position of the experientially motivated recipient (recipient’s perspective) or from the outside – from the position of an external observer. In the latter approach, the interest might lie in the wider external cultural and social contexts (sociocultural perspective) or in the summarisation of bibliographical data (archival perspective). These research lines testify to generically and thematically typical publications from all four linguistic areas – bibliographies, dictionaries, lexicons, case studies, deeper close readings and book-length research. The corpus of this study takes as its material, is composed of texts published in periodicals and online materials as platforms where popular literature is published and critically analysed. It also takes into consideration Central European feedback on the writers of the Western canon, imagological analysis of national stereotypes, popular socialist culture, fandom and fan literature and intermediality and transmediality of popular culture.