The first of the linked essays that make up What Was Literature? is called "Who Was Leslie A. Fiedler?" The answer to that question is the key to responding to the book title's question. Leslie A. Fiedler, as Leslie (now no middle initial) Fiedler tells us, was a literary critic who, for all his reputation as a rowdy, iconoclast, and clown, nevertheless proceeded from a principle dear to the academy with which he seemed to be in combat. This was the assumption that the amount of writing we can truly call literature is very small compared to the amount that is merely popular, or sub-literature, or trash….

According to today's Leslie Fiedler, it was this elitist Fiedler who in 1960 published Love and Death in the American Novel. Although today's Fiedler sometimes plays games with the historical record, he is certainly close to history when he portrays himself as one whose writings (and even whose person, at times) were condemned publicly by professors of literature who nevertheless put his interpretations to work for themselves….

But in the years following the completion of his book, Fiedler became increasingly uneasy with the "elitist" assumptions that had led him "to neglect or condescend to certain long-lived best sellers containing myths quite different from those which informed the books I took to be canonical." It was not the neglected myths in themselves that nagged at him. It was that the literary assumptions on which he proceeded required that he approach these myths in best-selling books, movies, and television shows with an acknowledgment that he was slumming, with an admission that his errand was sociological rather than aesthetic. This struck him as hypocritical, because the pleasures he (and others) derived from such works were literary pleasures.

Something had to give: either he had to kick his "sub-literary" habit or he had to revise his ideas about literature so that he could approach popular fiction without prejudice. He chose the latter course and What Was Literature? is, in good part, the record of his progress toward that choice. Literature was the writing valued by the likes of Leslie A. Fiedler who upheld elitist standards. But literature is far more democratic than that, Fiedler now says. Moreover, if we follow his example and recognize that the low stuff we covertly enjoy is every bit as much literature as the high art we talk about with those who we hope will respect us, then, he suggests, we shall not only be thinking more clearly, but we shall feel better about ourselves and our world….

What Was Literature? consists of two parts. The first, "Subverting the Standards," gives us a crash course on modernism, so we can get out of the elitist trap by understanding how we got into it. The second, "Opening Up the Canon," is a practical demonstration of how the democratized view of literature that results from this process can be applied….

I have a number of disagreements with Part One's animated account of modernism, but most are soothed by the realization that, after all, I am being given the mystique of the movement rather than its history. Fiedler's emphasis is on causes not present to the physical eye—points of intersection between the what that happened and the why of society's unconsciousness—and he offers himself as the intellectual picaro who represents us. Occasionally he strays into an outrageous generalization that is not sanctioned even by the convention he has established, but such wanderings are few in comparison with the number of illuminations we receive along the way. (p. 29)

I wish, alas, that I could derive the same pleasure and knowledge from Fiedler's governing argument as I do from the perceptions he uses in support of it. But while in Part One he quite fetchingly dismantles the conventional case for literature and popular fiction being intrinsically different, in Part Two he appears tacitly to affirm that there is a difference, although his interpretation of the myths before him explicitly denies this.

There are some stories, he says, that live independently of the means by which they are transmitted; they are "known" equally well when they are apprehended as words on a page, drawings in a comic strip, or moving images on a screen…. I agree with Fiedler that the "knowers" of the story of, say, Tarzan, can know it without ever having read the book called Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But I do not think that the story or the myth encoded in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville or Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain can be known except by reading the words on the pages of those books. This seems to me to indicate an intrinsic difference between the two kinds of fiction. All fictions are based on one or another of a limited number of fables. To attribute their effect to the fables they contain, however, rather than to the way they embody them in plot, character, and narrative voice, is to accept poverty for plenty. The difference between Tarzan and Huckleberry Finn is that the former is, relatively, no thinner for its being reduced to fable whereas the latter becomes so attenuated that it no longer is itself.

With Fiedler, I would be happy to put an end to expressing that difference in words such as "highbrow" and "lowbrow," terms which, whatever their original application, are today used to sneer socially at the "lowbrow" in order to deliver him politically into the protective custody of the "highbrow." But while I am happy to join a movement for the democratizing of literary appreciation, I believe that greater social sensitivity to what is included in "literature" still results in the recognition that there is a difference between what we call popular and what we call serious fiction. (pp. 29-30)

According to its author, What Was Literature? is intended neither for me, since I am writing about it, nor for you, since you are reading what I am writing about it. The audience at which he aims, Fiedler says, is an audience of those who have read (or seen) the works about which he writes, but who do not read anything about those works. As the ancient and honorable discipline of rhetoric teaches us, however, there is a difference between the assumed audience contained in a discourse and the historical audience that actually reads it. The assumed audience—Thoreau's "fellow townsmen," F.D.R.'s "my friends"—is an important part of the strategy of a work, but Thoreau reached beyond Concord for his actual readers and Roosevelt knew that many to whom he "chatted" were not amicably disposed.

Never fear, then, reader. What Was Literature? is really for you and me too—literate, highbrow, and snobbish though we may be—and it really is written by a learned professor, despite the facts that it is well written, gives delight, and is not by Leslie A. Fiedler. (p. 30)