this was not always the situation: until the early 1990s the state school English curriculum did not include a literary canon, and as a result studying classic literature like Brontë and Dickens remained the preserve of the privately educated. This is likely to have contributed to the feeling that these novels were elitist, and will have meant that state school students (the majority of the public) at the time were not helped to access, appreciate or understand literary fiction. The continued effect of this on the British population is twofold: ex- comprehensive students who are now adults and potential book buyers may maintain a feeling of unfamiliarity and dislike towards classic novels, preferring to consume other forms of media or less traditionally literary books, like genre fiction; and this attitude is likely to have been inherited by their children. Even if the new curriculum encourages students studying after 1990 to access classic literature and read novels without stigma, the after effects continue to be felt culturally. For one thing, it will take a while for the stigma to dissipate, even as (hopefully) each generation will inherit a slightly more positive attitude to classic novels.

This change will in turn prompt a shift in the types of fiction that people are willing to pay to consume and, in turn, publishers will respond by emphasising literary fiction over genre fiction, which will increasingly normalise reading it. The issue is that this process, which is really an undoing of the previous process of stigmatisation, is gradual and far from completion. The previously discussed rise of populism may well serve to undo it.

Why and how do economics affect reading?

Point 2: Examples of modern novels that do/ have had social influence, explore why this has been (however, may have to counter these i.e. has it been the film of the novel that has actually garnered interest/ influence? Is it on the curriculum?)

It would be too sweeping, however, to claim that no modern novel has had significant s