The Rise of the “As Seen on TikTok” Sticker

The novel—is it dead yet? Every decade seems to yield a new crop of death knells and eulogies explaining why the form has reached the end of its useful life. The French writer Jules Verne predicted, in 1902, that the newspaper would permanently displace the novel; the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset posited, twenty-three years later, that the great literary themes had been all but exhausted. Some critics, such as the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold, didn’t fear the novel’s death so much as its oversaturation, identifying the proliferation of “the bad and the middling” in an era of mass readership and ever-escalating literary production.