Reddit mentions of The Intellectuals And The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880-1939

The rise of "literary fiction" as a genre and belief that it is the sole genre of literary merit can be described by a multi-stage process:

1. The Modernist idea that art should be difficult. The Modernists had contempt for the common man and thus set out to create art works that required education to understand. Joyce, Le Corbusier, abstract expressionism (read Clement Greenberg on art and kitsch) all fit in this category. See John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses for more on this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Intellectuals-And-Masses-Intelligensia/dp/0897335074
   
   
2. After WWII, the GI program resulted in tons and tons of money being poured into universities. MFA programs like the Iowa Writers' Workshop became popular during this time. The professors at Iowa and these other universities were schooled in Modernism. At the undergrad level, "arts appreciation" courses also taught the Modernist conception of cultural history. Look at the way 19th century Academic painting is still dismissed in favor of the Impressionists.
   
   
3. The rise of databases to track sales to bookstores. Bookstores began categorizing their inventory like never before. Science Fiction, Romance, Erotica, Westerns, Fantasy, Fiction, Classic Fiction, Literary Fiction, etc.
   
   
4. The impact of movies. In many ways, movies are a far more emotionally engaging storytelling medium than novels. Novels are pages and pages of black and white text. Movies offer story, photography, music, actors, production design, and editing to present an overwhelming sensory experience. Just as the impact of photography hit painting hard (and was a big influence on the rise of nonrepresentational art) so too movies hit novels hard. Instead of focusing on story and character, things that in many ways movies do just as well as novels, writers began to focus on language at the sentence level.
   
   All of these trends together created the genre of "literary fiction" as we know it.

Here's "The Intellectuals and the Masses," which is just on the opinions of "the masses" by people in the literary world in the late 1800s, early 1900s.