The production of literature
“A writer in a small room typing on a laptop; a publisher in an office looking through a pile of scripts; a marketing department discussing cover designs; a bookseller in a shop stacking a pile of books; a supermarket shopper adding a bestselling novel to the weekly grocery trolley; a journalist on television debating one of the week’s new publications; a prize judge in a dinner jacket announcing a decision; an author talking to an audience at a festival; a commuter in a packed train immersed in a novel; a circle of readers drinking wine and discussing books; a sandy paperback lying next to suntan cream and towel. All these images are part of the contemporary literary marketplace.” (Caire Squires: The Marketing of Contemporary Writing in Britain)
Players in the cultural field of the book industry: authors, agents, publishers (editors, book designers), retailers (booksellers, chainstores, online retailers), reviewers, cultural managers (book festivals), critics, translators, educators (university courses), libraries + readers (consumers) + state
hostesses (Lady Ottoline Morrell: salon in London and Garsington)
general trend: professionalisation (of authorship and of dealing with literature):
amateurs, personal networks → professional authors and academics (F. R. Leavis)
class basis → national basis (educational role)
THE author’S position
romantic genius, Victorian sage, self-employed entrepreneur (Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant), hack writer
(1) end of 19th century: professionalisation of authorship (royalties, writers’ union, literary agents)
huge market – huge competition
(amateur men and women of letters vs. professional writers/craftsmen)
(2) parallel process: alienation of the writer (Flaubert)
artist vs bourgeois
(labour value of literature)
Modernism: opting out of the market logic; new private patronage system
success is suspicious (R. L. Stevenson about the success of Jekyll and Hyde: “There must be something wrong with the story”)
Split between high and popular lit
(3) social-political position of authors (Havel, Ady, Illyés, Rómulo Gallegos, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Sartre)
Prophet – intellectual – craftsman
Britain: Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, pacifism, women’s lib, 30s writers (Spain), 50s: CND
censorship
Thomas Hardy
Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Loneliness (1928) - “that night they were not divided”
Richard Aldington: The Death of a Hero (1929)
Joyce: Dubliners
Victorian times: Methodist pressure groups (Mr John Bowdler): Society for the Suppression of Vice
1857: Obscene Publications Act
(tested with Ulysses)
1933: trial in USA (Judge John Woolsey) - Defence Attorney: “It is axiomatic that only which is understandable can corrupt”.
1959: new Obscene Publications Act
October 1960: the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence)
Mervyn Griffith-Jones (counsel for the prosecution): “Would you like your wife or your servant to read such a book?”
Lawrence’s novel: both too vulgar and too difficult
Major issue after 1945: democratisation of (high) culture
200.000 copies sold in a fortnight
PRODUCTION (of the novel): material and discursive
Cultural role of novels: shaping identities, society’s interrogation of itself; mediating between private and public
Book: material object (eg. Victorian dominance of the three-decker novel)
THE publishing industry
before ww2: small publishers (Hogarth Press)
1970: Penguin bought (from Allen Lane) by Longman Pearsons
the paperback revolution
(image of a larger and more homogeneous public)
blow to circulating (private) libraries
Publishers: after 1970s: huge conglomerates
still independent: Faber and Faber, Bloomsbury Publishing (J. K. Rowling)
prize culture (Man Booker Prize) 1969-
reviewing industry
creative writing (University of East Anglia)
education
’English’ as a subject