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From Bestseller to Punchline: The Fall of Bulwer-Lytton

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By Rinku Answered 2 months ago

He became the poster child for everything the Modernists hated. His prose—ornate, melodramatic, and dripping with sentiment—came to symbolize Victorian excess and artificiality. The new literary vanguard of the early 20th century prized psychological realism, concision, and subtlety. They saw his work as didactic, overblown, and lacking in authentic depth. So, he was demoted from "serious literary figure" to a symbol of bad writing, his complex novels reduced to their famously purple opening lines.

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