Where Have All the Strivers Gone? - New York Times

Where Have All the Strivers Gone? - New York Times: "One conjecture I've heard is that modern literary fiction is just following a course set earlier by Romanticism in poetry. Subjectivity moves to the foreground; conflict becomes interior. You're not striving to best your rivals in the big wide world; you're struggling to come to terms with the ghosts of your past or the discord of the authentic self. According to this theory, nobody writes literary novels about worldly advancement any longer for more or less the same reason that nobody writes poetry about charging brigades, light or otherwise."