"That which is not worth contemplating in life,
is not worth re-creating in art."
Literature
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness.
The most important principle of the esthetics of literature was formulated by Aristotle, who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because "history represents things as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be."
This applies to all forms of literature and most particularly to a form that did not come into existence until twenty-three centuries later: the novel.
Man as a being who possesses the faculty of volition did not appear in literature until the nineteenth century. The novel was his proper literary form - and Romanticism was the great new movement in art. Romanticism saw man as a being able to choose his values, to achieve his goals, to control his own existence. The Romantic writers did not record the events that had happened, but projected the events that should happen; they did not record the choices men had made, but projected the choices men ought to make.
Man's new enemy, in art was Naturalism. Naturalism rejected the concept of volition and went back to a view of man as a helpless creature determined by forces beyond his control; only now the new ruler of man's destiny was held to be society. The Naturalists proclaimed that values have no power and no place, neither in human life nor in literature, that writers must present men "as they are," which meant: must record whatever they happen to see around them - that they must not pronounce value judgments nor project abstractions, but must content themselves with a faithful transcription, a carbon copy, of any exiting concretes.
[The] basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism (the volition or anti-volition premise) affect all the other aspects of a literary work, such as the choice of theme and the quality of the style, but it is the nature of the story structure - the attribute of plot or plotlessness - that represents the most important difference between them and serves as the main distinguishing characteristics for classifying a given work in one category or the other.
In art, and in literature, the end and the means,
or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.
Now take a look at modern literature.
Man - the nature of man, the metaphysically significant, important, essential in man - is now represented by dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, sexual perverts, homicidal maniacs and psychotics. The subjects of modern literature are such themes as: the hopeless love of a bearded lady for a mongoloid pinhead in a circus side show - or: the tragedy of a gentle young man who just can't help murdering strangers in the park, for kids.
All this is still presented to us under the Naturalistic heading of "a slice of life" or "real life" - but the old slogans have worn thin. The obvious question, to which the heirs of statistical Naturalism have no answer, is: if heroes and geniuses are not to be regarded as representative of mankind, by reason of their numerical rarity, why are freaks and monsters to be regarded as representative? Why are the problems of a bearded lady of great universal significance than the problems of a genius? Why is the soul of a murderer worth studying, but not the soul of a hero?
If you wonder what is the ultimate destination toward which modern philosophy and modern art are leading you, you may observe its advance symptoms all around us. Observe that literature is returning to the art form of the pre-industrial ages, to the chronicle - that fictionalized biographies of "real" people, of politicians, baseball players or Chicago gangsters, are given preference over works of imaginative fiction, in the theater, in the movies, in television - and that a favored literary form is the documentary.
Except for the exceptions, there is no literature (and no art) today - in the sense of a broad, vital cultural movement and influence. There are only bewildered imitators with nothing to imitate - and charlatans who rise to split-second notoriety, as they always did in periods of cultural collapse.
Some remnants of Romanticism may still be found in the popular media - but in such a mangled, disfigured form that they achieve the opposite of Romanticism's original purpose."
~ Above found at Ayn Rand Lexicon - Literature