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depends only on the degree to which it is loved.’ (Catton, 2013). Despite these protestation, however, the fact that the 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 naturally have to stories: ‘Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives’, he argues, they can be a way ‘for humans to feel they have control over the world’, and stories ‘inform our emotional lives’, helping us to gain empathy and conscience (Delistraty, 2014). One of the reasons that experts offer for the decline in the influence of the novel, then, is that the Western culture’s desire for a narrative is increasingly being fulfilled through non-fictional or semi-fictional media. This includes the rise of what is referred to by sociologists as ‘infotainment’, a hybrid of informational and entertainment-led narratives often exemplified in social media, newspapers and magazines, and television programmes like America’s ‘The Daily Show’ which report and comment on the news or give semi-fictional interviews in a comedic or satirical manner. As Rachel Donadio argues in her August 2005 article for ‘The New York Times’: ‘The Truth is Stronger than Fiction’, this means that ‘the line between truth and “truth” is growing ever more blurry, readers thirst for a narrative’…’and will turn to the most compelling one’. Similarly, because of the quick, constantly- updating nature of modern news reporting and social media, it is becoming impossible for novels, which can take years to write, edit and publish, t
