#literaryhistory

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LATRAME

Authors. Readers. Characters.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3d ago

Let's make a bet, cold.

Every era has despised the literature people actually read. The novel in the eighteenth century, the serial in the nineteenth, crime fiction and sci-fi in the twentieth, each time the guardians of good taste swore it wasn't real literature. Each time, the years proved them wrong, fifty years late.

So the fun question isn't whether it will happen again. It's : what are we sneering at today, in exactly the same way ?

Fanfiction. The twelve-volume fantasy saga. The romance selling by the million while critics look elsewhere. Interactive fiction. Stories written for and by online communities no academic reads yet.

We don't know which ones will last. But if history has a lesson, it's that today's list of "subgenres" almost certainly contains a classic or two our grandchildren will study. Contempt has never been a good indicator of value. Just a good indicator of the era.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4d ago

"Moby Dick" was a failure. Melville died believing he'd wasted his life as a writer. The book became a masterpiece thirty years after his death, when readers he never knew finally read it the way it needed to be read.

This isn't an exception. It's a pattern that runs through the whole history of literature. A text can arrive too early, say something its era isn't ready to hear, in a form it doesn't yet know how to read.

That doesn't mean every ignored text is a masterpiece ahead of its time ; that would be too easy, and false. But it does mean silence around your work isn't a verdict. A book's readership isn't always contemporary with its writing. Some appointments are made with readers who aren't born yet.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

In 1893, Conan Doyle throws Sherlock Holmes off a waterfall to be rid of him. Twenty thousand readers cancel their subscription to the Strand. People wear mourning bands, in real life, in the street. Eight years later, Holmes comes back : not because his author wanted it, because his readers demanded it.

A character loved enough stops belonging to the person who wrote him. No contract covers that.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

Aurore Dupin signed George Sand to be read. The Brontë sisters published under men's names. Romain Gary invented Émile Ajar to win, twice, the same prize you're not allowed to win twice.

A pen name isn't a mask. It's one more character, and sometimes it's the best one in the work.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

In the eighteenth century, doctors published warnings against novel-reading. Too many emotions. Dangerous for young women. A low, industrial genre, fit for chambermaids, while serious people read sermons.

That low genre went on to produce "Madame Bovary", "Anna Karenina", "One Hundred Years of Solitude".

Keep that somewhere for the next time someone tells you what you write isn't real literature.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

In 1839, Sainte-Beuve coins an insult : industrial literature. Target : serialized novels published in newspapers, written fast, paid by the line, read by everyone.

The hacks in question were named Balzac and Dumas.

Every era invents a contemptuous word for the literature people actually read. The word always ages worse than the books.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

In 1614, an unknown writer publishes a fake sequel to Don Quixote, without Cervantes' consent. Furious, Cervantes writes his own part two, and slips in characters who have "read" the fake sequel and think it's bad.

The first documented fanfiction provoked one of the greatest novels of all time, which is itself the response of a furious fan.

Three hundred years and counting. It's not a subgenre, it's a tradition.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Crime fiction was train-station literature. Sci-fi, rocket stories for teenagers. Romance, people wouldn't even mention it.

Today : university chairs, dissertations, conferences on all three. The route is always the same, kiosk, contempt, success, scholarly studies, pantheon. Allow institutions about fifty years' delay behind readers.

The fun question isn't whether it will happen again. It's : with which of today's genres ?

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