Literature, in a non-trivial sense, is inherently reactionary at heart. For instance, the great authors and artists of the twentieth century were considered reactionaries - and for good reason. Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh,

Benn, Bellow, Warren, the early Thomas Mann, Celine, Kipling, Conrad, Ford, Frost, Stevens, Stefan George, Junger, Claudel, Saint-John Perse, Borges, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Mishima, Kawabata, Soseki, Houellebecq, and so on. In the words of famed literary critic Lionel Trilling:

Even further are the ones that completely rejected political thoughts of progress and the modern world: Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Proust, Giono, etc. some of the famous artists normally held up as quintessentially leftist writers came to repudiate leftism itself later:

Mayakovsky, Essenin, Auden, Dos Passos, Malraux, Camus, Wright, etc. This trend continues in other eras, as most great literary figures have historically been on the side of what, in their age, stood for conservatism: Aeschylus and Aristophanes; Virgil and Horace;
Dante and

Chaucer; Dryden, Racine, and Corneille; Pope, Swift, and Samuel Johnson; Goethe and Scott; Balzac and Tennyson; Manzoni; Baudelaire; Dostoyevsky - the list goes on.And the conversions to the Right (Wordsworth, Coleridge), abound. It should be noted that two of the most widely

regarded Roman novels - The Satyricon and The Golden Ass - were essentially reactionary works attacking the decadence of Roman society at the time and extolling the aristocratic and conservative values and virtues of the past. While most emphasize the critical theory of

literature as used to analyze and reform society, most of the time, before the twentieth century this was mostly aimed at incoming and new trends. The work of Nikolai Gogol and Henry Fielding are prime examples of later readers misinterpreting the motivations for their criticisms

Aestheticism itself is deeply opposed to any notion of progress, and is thus fiercely opposed to history, the modern notion of which (in the Whiggish tradition) is decadent and full of itself. Art will inevitably be suppressed under any such regime - the Reign of Terror executed

Condorcet and Chenier, after all, and perhaps most of all from the utilitarian middle classes focused on productivity and trade, ideals which art and literature run counter to. One need only read about the mishaps of Baudelaire and Flaubert in high-bourgeois France to understand

Robert Penn Warren wrote in a Tocquevillean vein that since "the long drift of our American democracy has been toward the abolition of the self", we can expect in the future that poetry will be found ever more "subversive of the status quo"...

and more alienated from the purposes of society. We can conclude that in the history of the West, genuine art (art, not pop culture) by and large has been regarded as an adversary to progress and treated as such. Take this as you will for the current state of art in the West.

I have more to say but it's getting late, so I'll continue this thread another time.