Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
W
Somewhere along the way, though, folks seem to have forgotten that all those "great literary classics" of the past were not themselves written with any "high literary aspirations".
Shakespeare's plays were potboilers in the literal sense--he wrote to feed his family not to reinvent the english language. That his work stood the test of time and transcended cultures was unplanned and unintended.
Cervantes? El Quijote is a *spoof* of the popular "medieval romances" that were the literature of the day and whose readership had conveniently the romances were the genre fiction of a previous era.
Dumas? Doyle? Verne? Conrad? Austen? The Brontes?
High literary ambition? Hah!
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So true. And looking at that list, how many of these have romance as their central theme? Take the romance out of any of Austen's books, and you have pretty dull stories about social climbing.
Also, the article is based on books actually purchased - anyone who wants to read the classics will trot off and download them for nuthin'.