…most prose fiction seems to me to be only very marginally classifiable as literature, really, even when it’s very well written. Not a mainstream view, I appreciate, but what can I say, I was trained as a classicist. I just don’t really think prose fiction counts.
That’s from an interview with Moul. Anyone who reads Victoria’s Substack will know the whole interview is worthwhile and immediately go to read it.
So, does prose fiction count as literature? (Victoria does count Middlemarch as literature, and presumably quite a few other novels as well.) I am sympathetic to this view. When I was young, although I did of course read novels, I thought poetry was literature. While I retain a little of that prejudice, of course I know better now. But I do think that the supremacy of the novel in modern culture obscures a great range of literary accomplishments. A properly catholic taste encompasses history, philosophy, sermons, pamphlets, essays, biography, and all the other esoterica of prose you will find in collections of writers like Swift and Johnson, as well as the vastness of poetry, much of which remains unread by the modern literati. I would in fact enjoy a literary culture that placed less of a totalising emphasis on fiction and accounted all the other great literary arts more highly. We can, and should, enjoy it all! That starts a debate about “what is literature”… which is for another time.
Here’s the full interview.
Prose fiction will be literature once regular people stop liking it. That should come in a few decades, but it hasn't quite happened yet
Ha! Thank you Henry. I saw the title of your piece in my inbox and to start with thought, gosh, that's a coincidence, I thought I was the only one . . .