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The cultural decline of literary fiction

What happened?

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the literary (straight) (white) male.” The marginal benefit provided by an additional take on this topic, some clever new angle walking the tightrope between edgy and politically correct, is rapidly approaching zero. “The thinning of print magazines this century,” she writes, “meant a culling of fiction.” The internet, in her estimation (and mine), “makes fairly efficient work of splintering attention and devouring time.” As a result, she concludes that literary reading is “far too easily set aside.” So from the 1970s onward, literary fiction was seen less and less on the best-sellers list, though the later collapse of the talent pipeline beginning in the 1980s and 1990s with the slowing academic job market and the widespread failure of print magazines, is what finally killed off its commercial prospects.

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