This introductory chapter suggests three perspectives on the experience of reading popular fiction that might structure its study. These can be termed briefly, the world, the reader and the text. No single one of these elements can be completely separated from the other two, they co-exist in a complex and dynamic relationship, but each is crucial to our understanding of the contemporary experience of popular fiction. To demonstrate the importance of the relationship between world, reader and text, the chapter begins with two different representations of the experience of reading popular fiction. The first is from an essay by Walter Benjamin entitled 'Detective Novels, Read on Journeys'. The second extract is taken from Walter Nash's The Language of Popular Fiction. The text has been discussed in terms of form and structure, genre and in the context of the information age.