Dim the lights, half-muffle the bells, replace your Hatchard’s bookmark with a strip of black crepe: the novel is dead. Again. Will Self broke the news in last Saturday’s Guardian, proclaiming in characteristically sepulchral tones that ‘our literary culture is sealed’. He has form in this regard: this latest article follows another Guardian piece in May this year whose headline assures us that ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)’, and will presumably be followed by ‘The novel has ceased to be’, ‘Bereft of life, the novel rests in peace’, and ‘The novel has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible’.
It’s worth clarifying at this point that the aeolistic Eeyore is not predicting the demise of prose fiction in its entirety: it’s only ‘serious writing’, and serious readers of it, that are under threat (unserious readers, one assumes, can toddle off back to their Jilly Coopers).
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