Attacking photogenic young women authors and their publishers has become quite fashionable, particularly among older generations of wannabe novelists. The 'Bridget Jones' books are to middle youth professionals what Mills and Boon once were to housewives. Publishers are not literary critics but businesses out to cash in on a successful formula. The problem is not that popular fiction exists, but that it tends to be discussed in the same breath as literature. In academia and elsewhere, literary judgements of books have been steadily eroded, as books are increasingly judged on the basis of how they reflect the cultural identity of the author.
People are rightly wary of it.
This pretty much sums up the shift in literary criticism. While there have always been disputes about which pieces of work were 'great literature', there was some agreement that literature contained some universal quality that meant it could connect with people through time and place, crossing national and gender boundaries. Jane Austen did not just tell stories about posh English girls, their families and lovers - her novels go way beyond the confines of the plot. Professor Young says that 'claiming universal truths and values often means ignoring cultural difference'. But the concept of universality did give a sense of a common standard by which literature could be judged - a representation of the human condition, in whatever form that took.