English Literature Quotes

“Almost no novels, in fact, seem any longer to be ends in themselves. As words on the page, they represent transitional stages on the way to a final form: if they are adjudged 'high literature,' they are represented by a diagram on the blackboard; or if classified as 'low literature,' they become images on the screen. English majors are taught to deplore the latter transformation as vulgarization, although it is, perhaps, better understood as the democratization of art, which is desirable as well as inevitable in a mass society. This seems especially in the case of the novel, which was from the start a salable commodity: the product not of lonely genius and tradition, but of technology and the marketplace.”
― Leslie A. Fiedler, English Literature: Opening Up the Canon