Changes in literary styles over the centuries

Cafe Society
1

Continuing the discussion from What was the point of Saruman in LotR?:

How have literary styles changes over the centuries? Or even over recent decades?

Modern writers and readers seem to prefer stories with tight plots and few extraneous details. As compared to a book like Moby Dick which has a whale butchering manual in the middle of it. And large continuums of styles between and around them. Tell me more!

And how did these changes happen? Is this simply a natural evolution of the art form, or of the book market, or something externally driving it?

2

Would the rise of free indirect speech (or discourse) c. 200 years ago count as a change in literary style?

(Per Wikipedia, it’s “the literary technique of writing a character’s first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator,” or “a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech.”)

3

Um. There are some pretty effing massive doorstops in today’s world of literature, and a lot of them are pretty esoteric and convoluted in their content. Lucy Ellmann’s 1000-plus-page Booker Prize shortlist Ducks, Newburyport, anyone?

4

It’s hard to speak in general about “centuries” of literary styles all across the globe. But taking Charles Dickens as an example, he was writing serialized stories for magazines and he didn’t necessarily have a full outline of the plot before he started writing. So many of his books tend to read like a collection of vignettes with a huge dump of plot quickly inserted in the last few chapters to wrap everything up. I believe his writing technique evolved over time somewhat; Great Expectations has more of a consistent plot than Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby (say).

5

The style is just a popular now as it was in the 1800s?

6

These are the kinds of info I’m interested in.

7

Well, I think it’s pretty inevitable that to some extent literary style will follow conversational and other spoken style. All forms of set-text verbal communication, from complimentary phrases to political speeches to letter-writing to novels, are syntactically simpler and less formal than they were 150 years ago and more. ISTM it’s something of a red herring to focus on that just as a literary development.

That said, I think yeah, the exceptionally diverse stylistic format of a work like Moby-Dick, with all the natural history details, was more experimental than standard even in its day. Popular novelists like Dickens didn’t play with such digressive shenanigans. I think literary novelists nowadays are about as likely to try such experiments as in the 19th century. Mass-market fiction like Dickens’s serialized novels, or today’s genre fiction series, are another matter, where readers are expecting a more standardized narrative form.

8

@Kimstu ninja’d me. The concept of a literary “canon,” which favored certain literary works above all other writing is yet another legacy of the Victorians, like the nonsense about usage and grammar that was drilled into a century of schoolchildren. It skews everything people think they know about fiction.

Mass market popular fiction developed in the mid-19th century, as soon as high speed rotary presses were common. These “shilling shockers” (Britain) and dime novels (American) were violent, fast-moving, filled with stalwart good guys and loathsome evil villains, plotted to ensure a happy ending, and utterly formulaic. Most modern genre fiction (“bestseller” is a literal genre: multiple books on “how to write a bestseller” exist so that everybody can aspire to be Dan Brown) follows those principles almost exactly.

The literary canon has changed over that period, but even terms like the Lost Generation or the Modernists don’t yield easy summaries. Can anyone compare Hemingway to Faulkner, Fitzgerald to Mann, Salinger to Dreiser and find commonalities?

Literary fiction outside of what we remember as the canon - and some inside it - was undistinguished and nonexperimental. Examining bestsellers lists over time finds page after page of authors nobody remembers. (Warwick Deeping hit the yearly ten best selling books list four times in a row in the 1920s. Anne Douglas Sedgwick did the same non-consequtively. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dreiser, and Fitzgerald? Zero.) How were those books written? I don’t know, but even people who try to revive forgotten stuff don’t bother with them. And this is true for at least the first half of the 20th century and sporadically for much longer.

Bestsellers as a genre changed the market. Peyton Place prefigured supersellers in the 50s but I think the real takeover was in the 80s, with Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins and the others. Big fat books that gave more to the dollar.

I read the NYTimes Book Review. At least half the fiction reviews are of books like the aforementioned Lucy Ellman. Experimentalism is back in, at least among the tiny sliver of Americans who read such books. (Which is not me.) But book sales are overwhelmingly of genre books. Some genre books are literary, to be sure, and standards have been raised across the board, but formulas abound.

Although, if you want chapter-long digressions about technical topics without humans, hard science fiction provides more of it than Melville.

9

Thanks, @Kimstu and @Exapno_Mapcase, that’s the kind of publishing history I’m interested in learning about.

10

It’s a very interesting question! Myself, I think the rise of the graphic novel/manga/intersection of “comic book” and other fictional genres is going to be the major stylistic game-changer in literature.

11

(I have to ask, though: why is this thread tagged “middle-earth”?)

12

Because I side-jacked from a thread tagged as “middle-earth”. I’ve flagged to get it removed from this one.

13

Gotcha, thanks, sleeplessness alleviated. :grin:

14

It makes sense. It makes me think radio serials and TV series must’ve also had an impact.

15

I’m no historian, but I think it’s oversimplifying the current market to say it’s all tight plots without details. I recently read Kraken by China Mieville, a very popular author, and heavy on plot he is not. Long and meandering and bizarre. But what a writer!

Then you’ve got your fantasy and science fiction doorstop books, heavy with magic rules and high concepts.

I think mass market stuff is more visible because it’s more often covered in the media, but you’ll find plenty of literary stuff recommended by the New York Times etc. In fact I just read a stupid literary book recommended by the New York Times and I hated it. At any rate, there is still a market for literary and experimental work.

I do think there are probably differences in what would be considered mass market in the past and what is considered mass market now. Modern humans seem to have a diminished capacity for long-form reading. Many readers want stuff that is easily digestible and predictable. I have encountered this as a romance writer aiming for more complex themes. It’s not that none of these books are complex, it’s that readers don’t seem to care whether they are or not. It’s like they aren’t really paying attention to what they’re reading.

It’s also important to keep in mind that in modern times we have a far greater variety of choices about what to read. There are niches inside niches if you know where to look. For example, were you aware of the Christian motorcycle gang romance genre? Probably not, but it’s making money for someone. So these niche genres exist side by side with mass market stuff. It’s not even that the style of writing is different it’s that the entire industry has changed.

Me personally, I read very broadly. Romance, science fiction, noir, literary, it’s all literature to me. So I see a lot of diversity in what’s selling.

16

And in that, it seems to me he’s somewhat analogous to modern episodic TV shows, which have to produce a certain number of minutes per episode as opposed to a certain number of pages or words.

17

Agreed: Tolkien is not especially long-winded or meandering compared to plenty of other examples of fantasy that have come along since.

One thing that Tolkien does do that seems to be very much counter to modern literary style is to stay with one point of view for a very long time. Modern large-scale stories with multiple POVs tend to switch among those POVs a lot more frequently (as did Peter Jackson’s movies).

18

Much as modern TV or movies consider 3 seconds to be a long cut, but in the 1950s 3 minutes was the norm.

19

Which got bastardized into the bromide that Dickens was “paid by the word.”

20

Dickens was probably the first really famous writer to publish serials, but that became the norm for the rest of the 19th century. That Moby Dick guy also published in serial form. Fiction magazines at the turn of the century ran several novels simultaneously, some new and some reprint. I found a fun quote:

As a piece in Scribner’s Monthly explained in 1878, "Now it is the second or third rate novelist who cannot get publication in a magazine, and is obliged to publish in a volume, and it is in the magazine that the best novelist always appears first.

Magazines reached a much larger audience for fiction than hardcover publication. That remained true for as long as large-circulation magazines were a major part of reading, which was maybe the 60s. If the medium is the message, then magazine writing must have influenced writing in general, because endless, convoluted sentences and paragraphs don’t work in magazine columns.