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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7770901" data-attributes="member: 6874262"><ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> This thread has a lot of smart people offering naive/non-professional opinions. The reality is a little different. I did graduate work at a top university with America's leading expert in American publication history...basically, the study of "how well books did" when they were actually published. Everything you think you know about this is wrong. Shakespeare is Shakespeare because he invented the way we represent ourselves in words. (Two tests: think of a character in the past 400 years whom Shakespeare could NOT have invented. You can't. Secondly: name a book other than the Bible that a stranger in a bar will have read or experienced. To spice this up, assume he always tells the truth and that he will cut off your finger if you guess wrong. Which would you choose?) The idea that Shakespeare was "pop culture" is wrong for lots of reasons, the biggest one being that "pop culture" as a concept only dates from the 1960s. He was more like pro football--a whole bunch of people went to the plays. Many were felons. Few knew much about "dramatic art," and fewer cared. Many spent most of the "game" not watching the "game," even (especially) the rich, smart ones. All the authors you mention were most certainly writing for adults. Children were typically considered not human until the 19th century, and "childhood" as a concept was only really established in the 1950s when child mortality began to be unusual. The idea of writing "for children" as we consider it dates from around 1870, although the moral aspect of children's writing was fiercely advocated until the Baby Boom, when Seuss and others began to attempt children's writing from a child's purported perspective. Dickens wrote for "families," a concept that was also beginning to be invented in the 19th century, and essentially his "market positioning" (read it to everyone in front of the fire) defined the market. His most direct descendant is Disney. George Eliot, a far better novelist and far more influential *as a writer* to later novelists, did well but not as well owing to not following Dickens' positioning. Comics are not very sophisticated on a literary spectrum; people who think they are, are the equivalent of Iowans who think that Des Moines is a cosmopolitan, hip city. It most certainly is, for them. Quite frankly, there's very little to be done about this: rubes will stay rubes or completely transform into something entirely different by, say, moving to London. And it doesn't matter. London, well, Londons. Proust keeps on Prousting. Edit: fix quote tags </li> </ol></blockquote>

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