Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

12th December 2005

There are only a few readers of literary novelists outside the metropolis in England. Much of what is published in this vein rarely attracts the public attention as a whole; vanity publishing in this sense is vital but has little shelf life. Given this, and the astonishing power of the mass media, it ought to be said that posterity - the memory of talent and genius - is not so much a gift of public reverence but of public relations. The academia may fight this notion with its preferred canon (it has little to do with a canon of the future), but the mediocre and the formulaic have vested interests more powerful than the preservation of Literature: money.