"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."
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Literary criticsPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford facultyFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureFellows of the British Academy
Original Language: English
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Jonathan Rose, 'A Conservative Canon: Cultural Lag in British Working-Class Reading Habits', Libraries & Culture, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 102
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Carey
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John Carey
John Carey (5 April 1934 – 11 December 2025) was a British literary critic, and Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1975 (emeritus from 2001). He was known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books, twice chairing the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
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