Volume 69, Issue 1 - Special Issue: How to Read the Literary Market; Guest Editors: Dustin Breitenwischer, Philipp Löffler and Johannes Völz

This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approximation, commodity production. This has consequences for our understanding of the work of literary studies. We are no longer able to easily recur to preformed theories of the ‘literary’ as a category at least in some way exempt from extrinsic pressures. Attention to the ‘literary market’ remains superficial when it insists on paying attention chiefly to so-called literary fiction on the understanding that it has prima facie higher claims to our attention than popular genre fiction—it does not. In fact, as this essay argues, appreciation of the thorough commodification of art under capitalism asks us to take seriously the need to break with our categories; to insist on the primacy of interpretative attention in determining what kinds of fiction we study.

This essay analyzes the gradual commercialization of the book market in the antebellum period. It shows that the reality of book publishing in the 1830s and 1840s has little to do with traditional accounts of the antebellum period developed in the wake of or in opposition to F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance . The essay focuses in particular on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ascent into the literary establishment of the 1840s—based mainly on the promotion of his Twice-Told Tales —and on the attempts to advertise Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin across socially and politically diverse readerships in the South and the North.

Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and field, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, still provide systematic reference points for studies interested in literary cultures under market conditions. These concepts have found resonance in studies observing the changing organisation, structure, and social positions involved in the writing, reading, and circulation of literature. While both the conceptual clarity and the historical results Bourdieu achieved (in particular in his study The Rules of Art , originally published in 1992) have come under attack, both his key concepts and his multi-method approach function as a theoretical toolbox for present studies. The article discusses three studies (Childress 2017; English 2005; Guillory 1993) which make use of Bourdieu’s concept of capital in order to describe contemporary US publishing, the role of literary canons in higher education, and the status of literary awards. I argue that Bourdieu’s framework is productive in these cases when it is used in a heuristic way, when the idea of cultural and social capital is considered as processes and practices of valuation, and when it points to the political aspects of economies.

This essay aims at integrating conceptions of literary markets, marketing, and marketability into the study of literature. To combine textual and sociological analysis I look at spatial and spatializing strategies on various levels of literary communication: as fictional settings, as authorial placements, as reading situations, and publishing platforms. My contribution draws on Bourdieu’s interest in the economic side of literature as well as on more recent studies by Jim Collins and David Alworth, who have taken closer looks at the ecologies and affiliations linking literature to consumer culture and its affordances of product placement.

Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

My article’s title borrows a line from Thomas Sayers Ellis’s poem “Skin, Inc.” (2010), a poem which uses the metaphor of incorporation in terms of its economic and formal affordances: formally as signifying upon a container, a box, in which the poet/lyric persona finds himself trapped as he is trying to create and to write; and economically, as signifying upon the poet as entrepreneur, who has to sell a brand and a product in the literary marketplace. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the theory of the literary field, I think of the poem as a form of poetic position-taking in the literary field in the Unites States in 2010. In my reading, I explore the literary marketplace as presented in the poem, and I argue that we can use this image of the market to think about the role of race in the literary field in the US, in particular with regard to what has been called the “post-soul aesthetic.”