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Comment by purpleflame1257 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's true. Look at the printing press. Sure, Shakespeare is a classic, but most of the rest of what we read as "classics" probably centers around the mid-1800s (at least in English-speaking countries)

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Yes, that's exactly some of the time periods I was thinking of. The mid 1800s was a time when literacy was rapidly increasing and new serial magazines became popular. This new medium paved the way for the fame of authors like Dickens and Bronte, the sort you may be thinking of.

This only works if you compress the entire 19th century into a single point. Otherwise you have, eg Sense and Sensibility from 1811 vs Heart of Darkness from 1899.

If anything this claim merely shows the effect of “time compression” in which distant events feel like they happened around the same time.

Not to mention Frankenstein and Journey to the Center of the Earth, both of which are science fiction classics. And then, of course, you leave out the entirety of 20th century science fiction.

You're cherry-picking to establish your conclusion. Lots of classic authors from that period (George Eliot for example) didn't serialise their works in magazines.

Also the 19th century is not by any means considered generally superior to any other period in English literary history. Eg Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are looking sternly in your direction from either side of that timeline for example.

Shakespeare was about a century and a half after Gutenberg.

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