kitsch – n - Something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste.
Personally, I like Milan Kundera's definition, that kitsch is "the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling."
It grieves me to admit it, but there's a lot of kitsch (along with much that is brilliant) in Charles Dickens's fiction. For example, in Bleak House, I nearly went into a diabetic coma reading Esther Summerson's gushy prattle about her "darlings, Richard and Ada." On the other hand, the same novel's Mr. Lawrence Boythorne mad me laugh out loud.
