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six - Transgression and utopianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2026

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Summary

This final chapter is devoted to the kinds of pleasures popular fiction affords. These pleasures are not uniform and, not surprisingly, there are many different critical accounts of the diversions of the text. The basic argument in the chapter is that transgression always plays a part in our enjoyment. To transgress means to violate or infringe, to go beyond certain bounds. Pleasure is always transgressive because it oversteps convention, taking us out of the realm of conformity and into a more dangerous zone. The chapter presents two main examples of transgression and utopianism in popular fiction: Walter Mosley and Terry McMillan. Mosley and McMillan's novels demonstrate the dynamic nature of popular culture, its protean ability to supply an imaginative space for new social formations. This is the root of the utopian potential in all popular fiction: its capacity to imagine new ways of being in the world.

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