From The Times Literary Supplement
June 4, 2008
The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture
From book-burning and prohibition to Pulitzer Prizes and prestige
Michael Saler

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” This infamous statement of Nazi sentiment is not limited to Fascists: many critics become combative when discussing culture. They prefer to patrol boundaries rather than venture into the no-man’s-land of hybridity. In the 1950s, for example, C. P. Snow posited a hostile stand-off between the “Two Cultures” of the arts and sciences, ignoring important qualifications to his stark antithesis – including over a century’s worth of science fiction since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Similarly, recent discussions of “culture wars” and the “clash of civilizations” have a martial tone and apparently clear parameters. On closer inspection, however, the combatants wear a variety of uniforms. If culture is often war by other means, we are finally witnessing a truce in one longstanding conflict: that between so-called elite and mass cultures.
The rest of the story here at Times online.