Ever pick a venerable not-a-classic hundred year old novel/tome from the dustiest shelf of an antiquarian store and browse through it for a few minutes?

The 'wordiness", the elaborate sentence structures, the beating around the garden path, the clunkiness "never use one word where two paragraphs will do" type thing ????

I wonder - was the writing truely that 

'artificial'

for the most part of are we just a lot dimmer than our literate forebearers?

Look at the crap writing that dominates the best sellers lists today - are we, fellow Abers, as doomed a species as those populating the Edwardian Lawn Parties with book in hand langudily and sonorously tittilating (be quiet Wotan) rapt audiences?

In fifty or a hundred years time will such masterworks as

Green Ice

The Far Arena

Bilgewater

Death of a Red Heroine

Earth Abides

be regarded with a patronizing chuckle ????

"The Agony and the Ecstasy" is the closest to a 'Missing Link" between the days of yore and now that I havepersonally encountered - extremely difficult to get past the alnguage for the first fifty pages or so but then - mein gott! does it grab one with an unholy glee!

I disagree.

There was a marvellous article in Smithsonian some time back about a hugely popular Victorian era British poet - canna remember his name. This gent was an international mega-star for a few decades, and now not one in a million would recognise his name.

So - there are trends and snobberies relating to literature just like in everything else.

Will people be reading Shakespear in two hundred years time? Absolutely not - he has been an anochronistic git for a long time now and it is only in the precious athmosphere of the 'Literati' and poncified Actors (in plays subsidized by us suffering tax payers) that his reputation survives at all as a quaint remenent of the hegemonistic influence on the art world of the British Empire ( of course Old Boy - the best playwright in the world HAS to be an Englishman,,,what about old Shakespeare, he certainly wasn't a radical or the type to encourage seperatist movements...)

Anyway - IF there were more venues such as Southwarks Globe it would be FANTASTIC and Shakespeare would be actually MOST ENJOYABLE....but their isna and he aintna!

So - to get back to my ORIGINAL posutulate-

Has the standard of writing degenerated or become merely more 'au courant' ??????

Oh, I don't know.  I like that "anachronistic git" - ha ha - called Shakespeare.  He had a way of putting things.  "'Tis better to be that which we destroy than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy'" sounds so much prettier than any other way I can think of putting it.

Yep.  I once thought "Lisa Bright & Dark" by John Neufeld was "deathless prose."   Of course, I was 14 at the time.  But I still blush.

Blush ?

Now there's an archaic talent !