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Originally Posted by GA Russell
As I recall, in 1999 some group made a list of the twentieth century's best 100 novels, and nearly all of them were written before 1950.
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It's usually the way these top 100 things work, if votes are open to the general public then results are biased towards more recent works and if it's decided by a smaller group then the reverse tends to be true as they then want to feel superior to others by virtue of the choices so they will be older or more obscure.
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I am under the impression that many people feel that the nineteenth century was (at least so far) the high water mark of great novels.
So that leads me to believe that there is a problem unrelated to technology.
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If you look at other media, things seem to be getting more dumbed down all the time so while you will still get great works that have been done for their own sake, but the chances of a book getting both critical and financial success seem a lot lower nowadays.