Literature’s Changing Tastes – Out: Peter Pan; In: Blood

On Monday John Sutherland in the Guardian wrote about changing tastes in literature:

Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers’ votes the “novelists who may be read in 2029″. Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky: John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), HG Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455) and JM Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it’s pleasing to note).

The literary saloon blog makes the point that polls are populist,  suggesting that it is not the taste of the masses that makes books endure but the opinions of a small, literary elite – the academics and the critics. Is this the way things should be? Would it be so bad if, in 100 years time, the Richard and Judy Book Club had merged with the immortal canon?

Sutherland goes on to ask:

Why would our choices be so different from those of our grandparents? Because we see literature as “literature”, through the prism of literary criticism and A-level prescriptions. It’s “modernism” that was the big bang in the 1920s. Everyone knows that. In 2009.

If “modernism” was the “big bang” of the 20s, what is the “big bang” of the noughties? Or is it too soon to tell?

It is a game that universities around the country are already playing. When I was at university I took an Eng Lit class called ‘States of Damage’ about post 9/11 American literature – just five years after the event-  the thinking being that what is the point of literature classes if not to look at the contemporary, the relevant, the things that are being written about the important things that are happening.  Some of the books on that course probably will endure – but it did not shy away from the populist. It included Oprah choices (sort of), Richard and Judy books (Nicole Krauss’ History of Love) as well as more literary favourites such as David Foster Wallace and Philip “the novel will be cult in 25 years” Roth.

If I were to take a wild guess at what umbrella theme will bracket together the enduring books from 2009  it would be to do with retrospection  – a mini-movement that is about looking backwards, and a past that doesn’t stay dead.

We have the prevalance of historical fiction on the Booker shortlist, the Vampires with an unshakeable hold on the larynx of pop culture (from Twilight to True Blood to Let the Right One In, Buffy and so on), we have the Dan Brown and Dan Brown-esque fiction that is all about picking apart the history books, casting aspersions and drawing out theories.

Perhaps it is the political climate that makes us look backwards – the idea that the mistakes and errors of our forefathers, and the myths and stories they were founded on is what brought us to the crises of today. Or perhaps it is simply post-millennial angst? Or the rapid steam-train of technological progress making us nostalgic?

What do you think? What is the key theme of today’s fiction and what will make it endure?