Do you know who Dr. Frank Raymond Leavis is? He has had more cultural impact through his writing than perhaps any British Humanities scholar of the 20 th Century. He was the leading light in a movement that lent credence to the idea that novels were of artistic value. Seems silly doesn’t it? Obviously novels are important, The Bronte’s, Dickens all that. Surely someone must have read them before and thought these things are quite good? Well they may have done, but it was Leavis who was the first person to give them academic weight. He propagated the belief that popular literature was as important if not more so than the classical texts so prevalent in the education systems of the time, because they were reflective of the culture that produced them. He is the reason you probably didn’t spend days slaving over Latin grammar in secondary school. So why am I battling on about a long dead Cambridge lecturer? Well it’s to do with the methods we use to appreciate popular culture....