Although in England politicians tend not to take a Stalinesque stance on fiction, there is nonetheless evidence that politics has an influence on attitudes to novels in general. One of the reasons offered for the decline of the influence of the novel is that ‘difficult’, ‘academic’ novels with intentional social or artistic messages have come to symbolise something unpleasant for many potential readers. As Will Self argues in his May 2014 article for The Guardian, ‘The Novel is Dead (This Time It’s for Real)’, ‘throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour’, whereas now ‘the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism’. Here the writer addresses a political and sociological issue potentially at the crux of the novel’s social decline: what Self calls the ‘high art’ of the novel has ceased to be regarded as an aspirational indicator of education and sophistication, but has become associated for many with intentional esotericism and snobbery. This is despite the fact that literacy rates in the UK have continued to rise since the 1800s (from 60% in men and 40% in women in 1800 (Mitch, 2004), to 99% overall in 2003 (Historical Data Graphs Per Year: Indexmundi, 2015)), which could have otherwise been presumed to be facilitating a greater readership of literary novels. For Self, what takes place is a misinterpretation of the role of the novel which ‘actively prevents a great many people from confronting the very real economic inequality and political disenfranchisement they\’re subject to’. The rise of populism in the UK, and the anti-elitist sentiment it can direct towards various aspects of culture that seem inaccessible, has been observable since _____ (talk about populism and other examples across time/geography of its anti-art/ anti-literature concomitants). A recent complaint about an essay in The Paris Review generated a great deal of online discussion about this issue: a twitter user condemned the use of the word ‘crepuscular’ in the essay, condemning it as evidence of literature being elitist, because the majority of readers were unlikely to understand the word offhand.

The ensuing discussion involved many literary bloggers and columnists, including Elizabeth Catton for Noted who commented that ‘The idea that a work of literature might require something of its reader in order to be able to provide something to its reader is equivalent’…‘to the idea that a cut-price mobile phone might require a very expensive charger in order for it to function’ and argued that literature ‘simply cannot be’ elitist because ‘a book cannot be selective of its readership; nor can it insist upon the conditions under which it is read or received. The degree to which a book is successful depends only on the degree to which it is loved.’ (Catton, 2013). Despite these prot