By Rishi Janakiraman
When my friends ask me what my favorite book is, I don’t think I’d ever say a novel written in the past decade. Really, I wouldn’t say a novel written in the 21st century—my first instinct is to say something post-1945, postmodernist, pre-2000s fiction you can find on a list with some superlative in its title. Lists that begin with “best of” or “greatest.” I’ll be called tasteful, told that it’s nice to find someone contrarian. That, somehow, being in the Classics section of Barnes & Nobles gives your taste an air of legitimacy—and if you ever end up elsewhere, you’re deemed less discerning, maybe even a bit basic.
The reading marketplace has exploded since 1945. And as bookshelves continue to fill with newly-minted fiction, the tendency to compartmentalize has grown in parallel. The volume of new releases—each vying for attention in an increasingly crowded field—has led to a sort of literary balkanization, where genre and style are more strictly delineated than before. Literary taste has become a marker of identity. And the Classics section stands as a symbol of cultural capital. We’re in a literary marketplace that’s both more diverse and more divided, where the lines between highbrow and lowbrow, serious and popular, are continually redrawn by the forces of cultural production and consumption.
But this compartmentalization certainly isn’t new.
The highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy had a prominent emergence in the 19th century—Dickens’ serialized novels, while sharp in their social commentary, were criticized by literary purists as too maudlin, moreso entertainment than high art. Thomas Hardy’s works, on the other hand, were more “serious” because of their refined prose, their narrow reception. The two authors’ divide is emblematic of how literature has often been split into two realms—that of artistic merit and that of popular appeal.
And in the mid-20th century, the rise of a “paperback revolution” made literature more accessible while further widening the highbrow-lowbrow divide. Paperbacks, which included genre fiction affordable to the general public, were disparaged by purists as second-class compared to the hardcover, well-dressed works. The “highbrow”—which then included modernist fiction like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust—began as an academically-populated island. These were the authors to be studied, to be analyzed, while the rest were relegated to a less prestigious status.
In the later aftermath of World War II, this democratization of literature evolved with the introduction of Armed Services Editions (ASEs). These editions—lightweight, paper-bound, and simplistic in their printing—introduced soldiers to both classic and contemporary fiction. “Highbrow” works like Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels were among those distributed in ASEs, alongside the popular genre fiction of the time. The shift challenged the rigid classes of literary value, allowing modernism to cohabit with mass-market fare. Despite how entrenched they were, we’ve made strides to blurring a highbrow-lowbrow distinction—namely, the turn in the post-war literary landscape.
At the moment, we’re living in a techno-literary renaissance. We’re in an age where books circulate on internet spaces (the internet “BookTok” subculture), becoming microtrends that wax and wane with algorithmic tides. It’s certainly not free from critique. There’s been more compartmentalization, not into two classes, but rather into grand narratives—a trope-ification. From a structuralist framework, trope-ification represents a kind of repetition within systems of meaning: tropes are the building blocks that define the genre. “Found family” or “enemies to lovers” can be understood as recurring motifs in a genre like YA or romance, reinforcing genre conventions while informing readers on what constitutes a compelling story.
This compartmentalization reflects an ongoing reaction to the surge in literary production. It’s our desire, as readers, to impose order on the influx of new book recs, new plotlines waiting to be classified.
Every reader scrolling through their feed is consuming this repetition, this reinforcing, reifying cycle of familiar narratives. But it risks making the modern novel feel formulaic—when familiar patterns dominate, readers see the modern literary scene as flattened. They begin to resent it. They begin to sense a stagnation in the genre, where there’s a perceived lack of originality because of how predictable book recommendations are getting. And this stagnation isn’t one-sided: consumption reflects production, so when a certain trope sells, writers are incentivized to reproduce it.
I’m not going to deny that the trope-ified novel—or, largely, the atomization of genres—has had a stifling effect on contemporary literature. But I think there’s a problem with the recent trends we’re seeing online, where there’s been a revival of interest in the classics that often leads to a re-entrenchment of literary elitism. The renewed focus on canonical works and their perceived superiority risks revitalizing the hierarchies that have pervaded literature for too long. Instead of pushing for artistic innovation, there’s been a tendency to elevate the old guard, reinforcing a division between the highbrow and lowbrow. It’s reminiscent of the elitist attitudes that have historically marginalized unconventional and contemporary narratives.
It’s like there’s an unspoken expectation that real readers, the ones with “good taste,” only appreciate the literary heavyweights—those well-worn, established titles that have stood the test of time. Stray too far from that section, and suddenly you’re a part of the masses, the hypnotized wave of mainstream readers.
Their canon is reactionary, meaning that this internet-born image of “real literature” was formed by denigrating commercial fiction. By antagonizing the modern, there’s come a glamorization of the old, the canonized, the classic. I’d first like to critique the very exclusionary nature of this reactionary canon. It’s almost chiefly existentialist, quasi-philosophical fiction—authors like Albert Camus, Dostoevsky, Osamu Dazai, Sylvia Plath, Kafka, and a host of others. But even under this framework, other important writers are peripheralized, namely those from the postcolonial realm. I haven’t seen a single one of these creators appreciate the equally deserving oeuvres of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie, or Salman Rushdie. Their works, such as Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, offer profound insights into previously-colonized countries.
This selective reverence not only overlooks significant voices but also reinforces a colonial, historically-biased canon. By idolizing a subset of classic literature, we ignore the rich contributions from authors who bring critical perspectives beyond a primarily Western framework. Authors like Jean Rhys, whose novel Wide Sargasso Sea provides a crucial counter-narrative to Jane Eyre through a powerfully-critical, postcolonial lens. Or Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose theoretical work Decolonising the Mind confronts colonialism’s long-standing legacy on African literature and culture.
And I don’t think it’s productive either to relegate anything that’s modern as inferior to the old. Literature has never reached a “peak;” there hasn’t been a golden age of global literature. Tour de forces have been produced in every generation, and to dismiss contemporary works as lesser simply because they’re not yet encased in the “classic” label is a disservice to both modern writers and modern readers. We’re currently in the midst of artistic invention—from the haunting remembrance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels to the boundary-pushing narratives of Ted Chiang, today’s literature is still innovative.
Idolizing this subset of classics informs how we classify “meaningful” literature—it suggests that only already-canonized, often Eurocentric texts are worthy of consideration. By clinging to an exclusionary canon, we miss out on the actual broadness to the human experience. The harmful effect is twofold: it perpetuates a homogenous view of greatness and excludes unconventional narratives that form the new classics.
There couldn’t be anything less literary than that.
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