The literary establishment

Last week in the Guardian Geoff Dyer questioned the whole concept of the 'literary establishment'. He makes some good points, but, in view of MsLexia's recent experiment to find undiscovered talent and the shocking results (which I wrote about here), as I read Dyer's piece a thought was lurking in my mind which is best expressed by a response from Paul Bilic in this week's Review Letters, who says:

What he fails to address, however, is that to huge majority of non-metropolitan types who are not journalists or celebrities it is nigh on impossible to get a manuscript read by an agent, let alone a publisher. For these people, the notion of an establishment still means something, and, I would contend, more so now than ever before.