Editing The Author in Literature Part 2 (section)

==== The Introduction of the Author ====
By the eighteenth century, the novel emerged as a primary mode of literature in the West. And with the novel, the author is truly born. The novel, long-winding and detailed, focused not just on the heroic and the exemplary but also on the mundane and the banal. And it is precisely this focus on the mundane and the banal which made it famous.

With the proliferation of the printing press and the elevation of the secular life where literature was taken as a refined entertainment, the novel emerged as a means to entertain primarily the ladies of the higher class.

These petite women of the elite class were divested of the daily chores that the lower class was engaged in and had plenty of free time to acquire greater literary and artistic skills. Reading novels in those days was a means to do that: to gain skills and knowledge about the world.

This was not just true about Jane Austen but also about Charles Dickens. The working class seldom had the education, taste or money to indulge in such pleasures as reading a novel. And there was hardly a middle class in this era.

The Industrial Revolution was just starting. Novel reading was the exclusive realm of the elite. Unlike drama, the novel remained confined to the elite of the West.

On one hand these readers wanted to read about the life with which they were familiar with. This is why the novels of Jane Austen were that famous. On the other hand, they also wanted to know what was going on in the life of the less fortunate, the hoi polloi.

This is the reason that Charles Dickens was so famous in these circles. His stories about the seamier side of London; about the underbelly of the country, were something which entertained the elite too. It was only in later centuries that his works became more famous in the general public.

On the other side of the continent, the Russian salons of St. Petersburg would not be complete without reading or the discussion about The Captain’s Daughter or Eugene Onegin by their greatest poet Aleksandr Pushkin.

The environment was infectious. Growing up in balls and parties like this, Lev Tolstoy created some of the greatest gems: War and Peace and Anna Karenina. War and Peace are often claimed to be the greatest novel ever written if there can be such a list or comparison.