unnamed reader expressed a sense of being condescended to by an author and the fact that their tweet about it gained popularity and sympathy would indicate that this is a widely felt sentiment about literature. The fact that literary experts like Catton and bloggers for literary websites were the ones to vehemently defend literature from the accusation of elitism, especially in articles that implied ignorance, laziness and churlishness on the part of the accusers, may ironically only prove this further. This select group who claim to truly understand literature better than an average consumer represent the sense of elitism that surrounds, if not the books themselves, the literary world, making it feel inaccessible and even haughty for those who aren’t members of the clique.

It is arguable, therefore, that classic, canonical literature carries modern cultural connotations of elitism and esotericism, and that a recent growth in populism in the West could be responsible for the rejection of things like literature which are felt to be elitist. As a result, novelists and their publishers who wish to sell successfully are inclined to produce genre fiction as opposed to literary fiction, and aim to entertain and immediately identify with their reader instead of looking to achieve artistically. Profit as an aim, although not new among career authors (Charles Dickens is known for having been paid by the word when his stories were serialised in magazines, and as a result an appreciation of length can be observed in all of his novels), means that publishers are increasingly under pressure to release novels with mass-market appeal, regardless of their literary value. This correlation means that the decline of literary fiction novels can be directly ascribed to a decline in consumer demand for them, and populism is one potential root of this.

Another potential reason for a decrease in demand for literary fiction is a cultural shift in our consumption of narratives. In his article for The Atlantic, ‘‘The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling’, Cody Delistraty highlights the inherent psychological attachment that psychologists believe human beings naturall