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Potboiler
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A potboiler or pot-boiler is a novel, play, opera, film, or other creative work of low quality whose main purpose is to pay for the creator's daily expenses—thus the imagery of "boil the pot", which means "to provide one's livelihood."[1] Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers or hacks. Novels deemed to be potboilers may also be called pulp fiction, and potboiler films may be called "popcorn movies".
Usage
[edit]If a serious playwright or novelist's creation is deemed a potboiler, this has a negative connotation that suggests that it is a mediocre or inferior work.
Historical examples
[edit]- In 1854 Putnam's Magazine used the term in the following sentence: "He has not carelessly dashed off his picture, with the remark that 'it will do for a pot-boiler'".[2]
- Jane Scovell's Oona: Living in the Shadows states that "...the play was a mixed blessing. Through it O'Neill latched on to a perennial source of income, but the promise of his youth was essentially squandered on a potboiler."[3]
- Lewis Carroll, in a letter to illustrator A. B. Frost in 1880, advises Frost not to spend his advance pay for his work on Rhyme? & Reason? lest he be forced to "do a 'pot-boiler' for some magazine" to make ends meet.[4]
- A 1980s reviewer for Time condemned the novel Thy Brother's Wife, by Andrew Greeley, as a "putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler".[5]
- In the late 1990s, American author and newspaper reporter Stephen Kinzer wrote that reading a "potboiler" is "a fine form of relaxation but not exactly mind-expanding."[6]
- In an interview with Publishers Weekly, writer David Schow described potboilers as fiction that "stacks bricks of plot into a nice, neat line".[7]
See also
[edit]- Airport novel
- Misery literature
- Pot-Bouille, an 1882 novel by Émile Zola
- Pulp fiction
References
[edit]- ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2000. ISBN 0-395-82517-2.
- ^ "Potboiler". World Wide Words. 5 January 2002.
- ^ Scovell, Jane. Oona. Living in the Shadows: A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin, Warner Books, 1998, excerpt provided by The New York Times.
- ^ Cohen, Morton; Green, Roger, eds. (1979). The Letters of Lewis Carroll. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 397. ISBN 0-19-520090-X.
- ^ Mohs, Mayo; J. Madeleine Nash (12 July 1982). "Books: The Luck of Andrew Greeley". Time. Archived from the original on 15 October 2010. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ Kinzer, Stephen (19 April 1998). "Traveling Companions". New York Times. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ Dziemianowicz, Stefan (6 October 2003). "From Splatterpunk to Bullets: PW Talks with David Schow". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
Further reading
[edit]Potboiler
View on Grokipediafrom Grokipedia
A potboiler is a work of literature, art, film, or other creative production that is crafted hastily and primarily for commercial profit, typically resulting in inferior artistic or literary merit.[1][2]
The term derives from the idiomatic expression "keep the pot boiling," which refers to maintaining a fire under a cooking pot to sustain life, metaphorically extended to any labor done solely to earn a living.[3] Its figurative application to artistic works first appeared in the late 18th century (1783), though the modern sense solidified around 1840 in reference to hastily produced novels or paintings.[1][3][4]
Potboilers have historically proliferated in popular genres such as thrillers, romances, and disaster films, where formulaic plots and sensational elements prioritize mass appeal and sales over innovation or depth.[5][6] By the late 19th century, they became a staple of the publishing industry, exemplified in "light literature" series targeted at summer readers seeking escapist entertainment.[7] Often viewed with disdain by critics, potboilers nonetheless sustain many authors' careers, allowing them to fund more ambitious projects while providing affordable diversion to wide audiences.[6][8]
