Daily Inspiration Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

By 1851, Van Doren suggests, the adventure story had already started to feel like yesterday's thrill ride - but it had quietly done literature a favor more durable than any plot twist. His target is less the genre than the social suspicion that once clung to the very idea of the novel: frivolous, morally dubious, a guilty pleasure for idle readers. Adventure tales, in his telling, functioned as a kind of cultural laundering. They smuggled the novel into respectability by wrapping narrative appetite in the alibi of action, travel, and presumed masculinity: exploration instead of introspection, "experience" instead of sentiment.

The elegance of the sentence is in its double movement. "Antiquated" concedes that fashion changes; "rendered a large service" reframes the obsolete as historically necessary. Van Doren is also winking at how literary legitimacy gets made: not by pure aesthetic argument, but by shifting what audiences are willing to be seen consuming. Once adventure becomes a respectable form of reading - educational, empire-adjacent, character-building - the broader category of the novel benefits. The stigma dissolves not because gatekeepers suddenly admire fiction, but because popular forms normalize the habit.

The year marker matters. Around mid-century, realism is consolidating, serialization is booming, and the novel is becoming a mass commodity. Van Doren, a critic writing in an era when the novel's prestige is assumed, is tracing a genealogy of that prestige back to a supposedly lower, now unfashionable mode. It's a subtle defense of popular literature: even the "cheap" stuff can change what culture permits.