How to Read the Literary Market: An Introduction

Abstract

Understood as amodern institution, literature is historically bound to the extension of market rationality. The commodification of literature since the late eighteenth century has changed the ways in which we handle literary works: rather than just perused by individual readers, books are promoted, traded, consumed, and legally protected. Over the past three decades, scholars have focused increased attention on how to conceptualize this encroachment of market principles into the sphere of culture (Agnew 1986; Bourdieu 1996; Woodmansee 1994). They have shown that concepts like ‘the fine arts’, ‘high literature’, and ‘aesthetic autonomy’ have evolved not in opposition but rather as historical responses to and functions of the commercialization and professionalization of culture. In so doing they have reflected upon an array of intersecting cultural developments such as the specialization of the poet as professional writer and distributor of a marketable commodity and the diversification of literary practice across artistic and commercial spaces. What conjoins these projects is thebroad questionof how to read the literarymarket. Many approaches toward literary market economies have pursued the aim of identifying the absent causes that determine literary production and consumption. This objective informed the works of marketplace critics of the 1980s (e.g., Gilmore 1985; Michaels 1987) but has also inspired the bulk of the more recent “New Economic Criticism” (e.g., McClanahan 2016; Poovey 2008). These branches of revisionist scholarship revolve around the social and economic, the material and ideological implications and constraints conditioning the production, reception, and distribution of literature. They emphasize literature’s crucial function as a site of political resistance and complicity, albeit by positing a rather static causality between the social and the cultural, politics and literature. A number of competing contemporary approaches stemming from the resurgence of the sociology of literature have provided alternatives to the premises