Joanna Trollope’s assault on JK Rowling (‘She’s a threat to literature,’ 6 May) puts the bizarre proposal that engagement with social media poses a threat to literature. Examples proliferate of authors who were active social critics, perhaps the most obvious being Dickens, who wrote to Wilkie Collins: “Everything ... shows beyond mistake that you can’t shut out the world; that you are in it, to be of it ... that you must mingle with it, and make the best of it, and make the best of yourself into the bargain.”
However, it’s hard to resist the suspicion that behind Trollope’s attack lies a familiar literary snobbishness. Rowling’s unashamed practice of popular fiction and its prose style has been criticised before, notably by Harold Bloom in the Wall Street Journal. It was just as vigorously – and rightly, in my view – defended by Stephen King in the New York Times. We should be glad that authors of dynamic fiction engage with the politics and technologies of the day, and that such engagement provides a valuable example for young readers.
Professor Andrew Burn
Professor of English, media and drama,
University College London
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