“Potboiler: A work written merely to gain a livelihood. The term is at least as old as the 18th c. A classic example of the potboiler that transcends its immediate end is Johnson’s philosophical ‘novel’ or didactic ‘romance’ (qq.v.) Rasselas (1759), which was written in the evenings of a week to defray the expenses of his mother’s funeral and to pay her debts. See KITSCH.
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1998.
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