Examples of Condemned by History in Literature.
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Genres
- During the 1850s, there existed the genre of "anti-Tom" literature
(or plantation literature). It was written mainly by authors from the Southern US in reaction to the anti-slavery work Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such books were Author Tracts that portrayed slavery as a benevolent system that existed for the good of black people, and the arguments against the "peculiar institution" as a sack of lies. Abolitionists were used as strawmen, presented as either misguided fools who would often "come around" by the end once they saw the "reality" of slavery, or as mustache-twirling Damn Yankee villains who were out to destroy the Southern way of life. They were supposedly motivated less by compassion for the slaves than by personal gain. For obvious reasons, this genre died out very quickly after The American Civil War, while Uncle Tom's Cabin has gone on to be regarded as one of the great American novels. - The 2000s saw a boom in young adult books about "elite" high school girls, following the success of Mean Girls. Books about the lives of rich spoiled teenagers found a big market share. One of the more successful examples, Gossip Girl, was turned into an even more successful TV series. To a lesser extent, the similar series The Clique became a very short-lived Cash-Cow Franchise. However, multiple factors put an end to this trend, as the Alpha Bitch was already firmly ingrained as a villainous character and youth bullying becoming a hot topic towards the end of the decade, which turned the main characters of these books from enviable people into Villain Protagonists. The Great Recession around the same time made the large displays of wealth in the books look tacky and tasteless. Also, many of these series received heavy criticism for depicting their characters (who were almost always minors) in a sexual, sleazy manner. Nowadays, if any of these series are remembered, they are targets of ridicule for the people who grew up reading them, or seen as examples of everything wrong with youth culture in the 2000s.note
Authors
- Non-fiction author David Irving was once a respected "maverick" historian of World War II, widely praised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and ability to find historical documents. While some of his claims were disputed by professional historians, critical and popular opinion of him was generally positive, as a self-educated outsider offering a new perspective on the war. However, things started to shift in the late 1970s, when he began promoting historical negationism. In his 1977 book Hitler's War, he claimed that Adolf Hitler merely used anti-Semitism opportunistically to get elected and had no knowledge of The Holocaust, as well as blaming Winston Churchill for the war's escalation and characterizing the German invasion of the Soviet Union as a preemptive strike intended to prevent an impending Soviet attack. This book's critical reception was resoundingly negative, and marked a turning point for his literary output.
While his books continued to sell well, historians and critics began to criticize the inaccuracies, misrepresentations and biases present in them. Over time, Irving's claims about the Holocaust became increasingly controversial, culminating in endorsing outright Holocaust denial when he testified at the 1988 trial of German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. His testimony and subsequent legal battles completely destroyed his reputation outside of Holocaust denier and Neo-Nazi circles, and many of his earlier works were re-evaluated in a more jaundiced light.
When the fall of the Iron Curtain enabled access to materials that disproved many of his claims about World War II and the Cold War (notably definitively proving that his estimates for the Dresden bombing's death toll were greatly exaggerated), serious questions were raised about his methodology and research, and this combined with many unsavory facts about him coming to light means that his work is no longer considered serious good-faith scholarship, with even the most charitable readings of his bibliography saying that all of it is slipshod and bias-ridden at best. Even more damaging was the libel lawsuit he himself brought against Deborah Lipstadt for (truthfully) calling him a Holocaust denier, fictionalized in the movie Denial. Irving lost the case, went bankrupt, and was legally classified as a historical fraud, destroying his career once and for all. - In the later 19th century, Semyon Nadson was a superstar of Russian poetry. Ever since his debut as a poet, his publications sold extremely well, and he had a massive fanbase among young people who would gather at public events with Nadson present as a guest reader of his own verse and applaud him without stopping. Nadson's biography was full of Woobiedom (his father died when Nadson was only two, his mother's second marriage was unhappy, he had to live with his aunt and uncle while not getting along very well with his peers, and later in life Nadson struggled with tuberculosis just like his mother), which influenced his poetry heavily. Nadson was awarded the Pushkin Prize (the most prestigious literary award of Tsarist Russia), and Nadson's funeral was attended by thousands of fans and fellow poets and writers. Literary critic Vladimir Burenin was particularly infamous for going after Nadson towards the end of the latter's life, including claims of Nadson feigning his illness, with many (including Anton Chekhov) viewing Burenin as unnecessarily harsh towards the young poet.
By the time the Silver Age of Russian poetry rolled around, however, opinion on Nadson had soured considerably. Many poets of the Silver age were no doubt familiar with Nadson's work, given how massive he was, but they viewed him by and large as a literary curiosity whose fame simply got out of hand. Valery Bryusov, for whom Nadson was an early inspiration, described him thusly: "Unfinished and motley language, formulaic epithets, sparse choice of images, sluggish and stretched speech - these are the characteristic features of Nadson's poetry, making it hopelessly outdated." Vladimir Mayakovsky was also notably dismissive of Nadson in a poem dedicated to Pushkin's anniversary, essentially lamenting that Nadson didn't deserve to have his (alphabetic) place between Mayakovsky and Pushkin. It has thus become common for Russian writers to take jabs at Nadson in their work through the whole 20th century and beyond.
In the modern day, Nadson's works hadn't quite recovered their popularity. The few times they get brought up, it's mainly in the context of Nadson's inexplicable popularity during his time, and actual evaluation of his poetry is a mild Broken Base. Nadson is left out of most school curriculums, and school students are mainly exposed to him through second-hand means (Nadson is referenced and quoted in Ivan Shmelyov's How I Became A Writer, for example) and not directly.
Books
- Neil Strauss' The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pick-up Artists was a massive success when it first came out in 2005, selling over 3 million copies and propelling its central subject, former magician and self-proclaimed "seduction guru" Mystery, to stardom with his own best-selling book and reality show. However, as the subculture of pick-up artists became better understood, the book became subject to increasingly harsh scrutiny for promoting and glorifying an openly misogynistic lifestyle that treated women as robots that could be "won" with the right tactics, and little in the terms of actually caring about them as people. The final death blow was a decade later in 2015, when Strauss published the follow-up The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, where he openly denounced his original book and showed how following it like he did ultimately did nothing but damage his own life and relationships. Today, the book is only remembered for emboldening a dangerous subculture, with Mystery and those like him now viewed as bitter con artists who used the book's success as a means of earning profit.
- Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded was a best-seller in 1740. Its psychological analysis was revolutionary for its time and remains important to those studying the history of novels. It was a huge cult hit in its era, spawning trading cards and seeing many people name their daughters after the heroine. However, its storyIn summary... has not aged well at all, and its once-revolutionary focus on the characters' thoughts and feelings over their actions has since become commonplace. Many people nowadays take the side of Richardson's rival, Henry Fielding, who never liked the novel and argued that its morally perfect main lead, tale of Love Redeems, and spouting morals with as much subtlety as a stack of bricks made the novel virtually impossible to connect to. Fielding would go on to write a vicious Take That!, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, in which, among other things, the focus of Pamela on the heroine's "virtue" (read: virginity) is mocked by having characters obsess over Shamela's "vartue". Richardson's other main novel, Clarissa, has fared better, regarded by many as the greatest novel in the English language, and still the longest.
- Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was a smash hit and instant bestseller when it debuted in 2011, hailed by both critics and readers (especially those within geek culture) for its nostalgic affection for '80s pop culture, its fun, lighthearted Genre Throwback to the escapist Wish-Fulfillment sci-fi and fantasy adventure films of that decade, its cool virtual reality setting, and its Proud to Be a Geek message. The movie rights were sold even before the book hit shelves, with Cline himself writing the screenplay and Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker deeply tied to the era of pop culture that the book was nostalgic for, tapped to direct.
However, even at the time there were some critics who took issue with the book, seeing it as a juvenile Power Fantasy that relied on the Nostalgia Filter of its readers to cover for its clunky Purple Prose, unlikable leads, and questionable messages that seemed to actively celebrate and glorify arrested development, nerd elitism, franchise consumerism, and retreating from reality into a fantasy world. As the decade wore on and a series of scandals and controversies damaged the once-positive image of both geek culture and the Silicon Valley tech companies that the book celebrated, this view on Ready Player One displaced the initial praise as the mainstream opinion, with the author's second novel and a poorly-received sequel in 2020 only seeming to bury the book further, laying its mistakes bare by repeating them without improving on them. Nowadays, when Ready Player One is brought up, it's usually to dismiss it as hollow, lazy pandering to geek culture and a symbol of its worst excesses, a novel that was only ever popular because readers were tickled by its barrage of references to beloved '80s properties. If people give it any praise at all, it's usually directed less towards the book itself than towards its 2018 film adaptation, which removed or softened many of the more contentious parts of the book. To quote Constance Grady, writing for Vox:A time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused by [the backlash]. In 2011, Ready Player One was beloved. It was "a guaranteed pleasure." It was "witty." It was not only "a simple bit of fun" but also "a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own." What gives? How did the consensus on a single book go from "exuberant and meaningful fun!" to "everything that is wrong with the internet!" over the span of seven years? - The Sheik by Edith Maude was a huge bestseller when it was first published in 1919. The novel was adapted into a film in 1921, which was a blockbuster that turned Rudolph Valentino into one of the first Hollywood sex symbols. Between its initial release, a resurgence when the film was released, and another revival when the star-crossed Valentino died young in 1926, the novel was reported to have sold 1.2 million copies. Although it was well-received and popular in the 1920s, The Sheik is now widely despised. Why? Because the premise is about an English girl that is abducted by an Arab sheik who repeatedly rapes her until she falls in love with him. This was seen as romantic. Worse, said rapist is revealed at the end to be a child of European immigrants, purely so that the writer wouldn't have an interracial marriage on their hands. Nowadays, it is seen as the pinnacle of Values Dissonance and the early 20th century's equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Translations
- Åke Ohlmarks' Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings was well-received in Sweden at the time, with critics praising it as a magnificent "swedification". However, its reputation turned far more hostile after it became known that it contained numerous misunderstandings, dubious name translations and arbitrary additions, such as the infamous confusion between Éowyn and Merry in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It didn't help that Ohlmarks' approach of adapting the work to his own style instead of striving to match the original was accepted at the time, but is frowned upon nowadays. In 2005, the fandom rejoiced when Ohlmarks' translation was finally superseded by a more faithful one.
In-Universe Examples
- The 2016 non-fiction book But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman is an examination of this trope and its inverse. He argues that future generations might look back on the pop culture, political debates, social structures, and scientific theories of both the present day and the 20th century in ways very differently from how we regard them, much like how we look back on the prevailing ideas and culture of the Middle Ages through the 19th century. The introduction alone recounts how Aristotle's theory of gravity stood for two thousand years as 'conventional wisdom' before being discredited by Sir Isaac Newtonnote , how Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was initially a critically-roasted, career-killing flop until the post-World War I generation rediscovered it as a classic, and all the hilariously wrong predictions made by futurists in the 20th century.
