Genres Extinct

My recent post about Nevil Shute set me thinking about literary genres, and their rise and fall. Shute’s own particular niche is pretty well dead— not a lot of stories about zeppelins or epic aircraft flights being written these days. But Shute’s in good company. For example, I think we can safely say that the Homeric epic is dead. At one point producing a long narrative poem was a writer’s best chance of getting a Nobel Prize, particularly if it could be considered anational epic, a poem def...