from his intro to Georg Lukács The Historical Novel

With a new class-conscious defense of middle-class privilege, however, the historical novel also, as a form, loses its vitality and its vocation, and is degraded, as Lukács shows in a wealth of illustrations… , into a narrative that is at once archeologizing and modernizing, which now takes the external world as a mere dead, decorative spectacle… and yet which at the same time paradoxically uses that decorative background as the pretext for a host of projections of contemporary psychological states (i.e. ennui, anxiety, neurosis), but also contemporary philosophical issues and concerns, into a past where they have no place.”