The Unquiet Dreams of Lesser Malaysian Writers

Using the ‘Global Malaysian Novel’ as a focal point, my paper demonstrates how the emergence of this critical conceptualization is a shift that problematizes traditional postmodern and postcolonial modes that have not yet transcended the nation as a frame of reference. When ‘Global Malaysian Novels’ are being written, marketed and sold outside Malaysian borders, to what extent do these texts retain their capacity for representation: Asian identities, national identities, regional and diasporic? While a critique of their complicity in Global Literary Markets centered in the U.K. and U.S. is often reduced to an ad hominem attack, there remains much to be said about the effects of their increasingly transnational material productions upon their more formally understood aesthetic and literary qualities. As such, I explore the discursive effects of the ‘Global Malaysian Novel’ as a transnational production in Southeast Asia, and how literary scholars have approached contemporary Asian literatures and attempted to situate them within realms of the national, within postcolonial Southeast Asia and within wider World Literature frameworks. In particular, I chart not only the historical production of literary texts written in English in Southeast Asia since 1945, but the current discourse of English Literary studies in the region.

Marketing Anglophone World Literatures

From the nineteenth century onwards, world literature has been closely connected to socio-economic reasoning, which has shaped (and continues to shape) how it is disseminated, received, and produced. Based on first marketing considerations by writers in the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the importance of ‘glocal’ Anglophone literary markets and explores key developments and challenges in marketing Anglophone world literatures. In addition to investigating the seminal roles played by publishers, literary agents, and retailers, it discusses the impact of literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, in the attention economy as well as growing trends of self-marketing, self-publishing, and the role of small online platforms in promoting national literatures and disseminating the works of both established and upcoming writers.

How Useful is Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital for Describing Literary Markets?

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.

From Product Placement to Boundary Work: Further Steps towards an Integrated Sociology of Literary Communication

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.

Crossing the Borders of the Literary Markets

Det er en uomtvistelig kendsgerning, at Knut Hamsun har opnået status som en af de mest fremtrædende norske repræsentanter for verdenslitteraturen. Hans værker er blevet oversat og distribueret internationalt og pådrager sig stadig verdensomspændende opmærksomhed. Et centralt aspekt af hans internationale anerkendelse er hans egen overskridelse af grænser, dvs. hans rejser og ophold udenfor Norge, ikke mindst i et af samtidens litterære centre, Paris. Her opholdt Hamsun sig to gange mellem april 1893 og juni 1895. Det var også her, han lærte sin fremtidige tyske forlægger, Albert Langen, at kende. Langens forlag blev efter sigende oven i købet grundlagt pga. Hamsun. Ikke desto mindre udkom Hamsuns første bog i tysk oversættelse hos S. Fischer Verlag. Begge forlag var kendt for deres indsats for udbredelsen af især skandinavisk litteratur i tysk oversættelse. Denne artikel fokuserer på de afgørende betingelser for den tidlige transmission, formidling og cirkulation af Hamsuns værker i Tyskland samt den afgørende rolle, som nøglefigurer som formidlere og oversættere spillede i denne sammenhæng.

Writing and Distinction

Chapter 2 considers both the protagonists and the authors of the novels in this study as ‘writer-critics’ who share their ideas about literary quality through discussion of both their own writing and other people’s. As institutions set up during the Punto Fijo period (1958-1998) to endow writers with literary capital and raise the reputation of Venezuela in international literary circles have been subsumed into the Bolivarian ‘Platform for the Book’, some writers and critics are concerned that a focus on ideology will undermine literary quality. In Transilvania unplugged (Sánchez Rugeles, 2011), Todas las lunas (Kozak Rovero, 2011) and Rating (Barrera Tyszka, 2011), characters both attest to the significance of well-written literature for them and display their literary knowledge and tastes as a sign of distinction. As professional writers move away from the state, they are faced with new challenges, in the form of the demands of international literary markets. Throughout La fama, o es venérea, o no es fama (Castañeda, 2012), the author-narrator is caught between an aspiration to write challenging and experimental fiction and a desire for commercial success.

Literary Agents

Despite early resistance from publishers such as William Heinemann, the expansion of British and American literary markets between 1880 and World War I rendered the services of a shrewd and knowledgeable literary agent necessary. This was especially the case for authors who hoped to make a living from their literary income. Agents arranged terms, negotiated rights and contracts, assessed markets and placed material accordingly. They helped navigate an increasingly fragmented print culture field and by doing so served an important mediating role between publishers, authors and the mercurial reading public at the turn of the twentieth century.

Senses and Sensibility: The Civil War as Lived Experience

Among wartime and postwar Americans, North and South, an appetite to narrate their experiences of preserving Union or achieving state sovereignty is reflected in their many accounts of the coming of the Civil War, its fighting, and its aftermath. Private letters from the home front and front line were regularly written and received; despite shortages of paper and ink, diaries and journals were diligently kept, recording experiences at both local and state levels; and memoirs and reminiscences, usually written many years after the events they describe, were produced for regional, national, and even international literary markets. These eyewitness accounts from a wide range of historical actors offer scholars, students, and general readers a remarkably detailed, intimate, and valuable glimpse of lived experience during four years of fighting that shaped a nation.

Outlines of Diachronic Intersystemic Development

This chapter presents some outlines of the diachronic intersystemic development of the modern Arabic literary system. The space between the text, its author, and the reader is understood as constituting both an economic environment (e.g. literary markets, publishing) and a sociocommunicative system that passes the meaning potential of the text through various filters (e.g. criticism, literary circles, groups, salons, public opinion) in order to concretize and realize it. All other spaces related to literary production and consumption, including the linguistic, spiritual, social, national, and economic spaces, are also considered, together with looking at the interaction of literature with, for example, religion, territory, state nationalism, language, politics, economy, gender, electronic media, and philosophy, as well as foreign literatures and cultures and examples of reciprocal interference between Arabic and Western literatures in the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century.