Literary Agency

Author(s):  
Laura B McGrath

Abstract This essay is one part documentation and one part provocation, with a simple goal: to acknowledge the agency of the literary agent. There is no figure more significant to contemporary literary production and less studied by scholars than the agent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted with 28 literary agents over the course of four years, I argue that agents shape the form and content of contemporary fiction by acting as administrators of the logic of the marketplace, conditioning their clients to write in and for the international multimedia conglomerates known as the Big Four. I take the agent’s list to be one of the central organizing heuristics of the contemporary literary field and read the list of one agent, Nicole Aragi, to examine what I call “corporate taste”: personal aesthetic judgments carefully calibrated to anticipate and respond to the demands of publishing conglomerates.Agents calibrate their aesthetic judgments to anticipate and respond to the demands of publishers and the market, becoming administrators of the logic of the corporation, thus shaping the form and content of contemporary fiction.

Viatica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maéva BOVIO ◽  

This article focuses on the writer Myriam Harry, who put the East at the heart of her literary production. As an exceptional case among travellers of her time, Harry blended different cultural universes in her books, which is particularly true of D’Autres îles de volupté where Swahili, European and Arab cultures rub shoulders. The analysis centres around the author’s systems of enunciation, revealing a contradictory position in terms of cultural identity, but also regarding the ways in which the writer tries to situate herself within the orientalist literary field.


2019 ◽  
pp. 190-214
Author(s):  
Teresa Pepe

The chapter discusses the relation between these blogs and the events of the 25th January uprising. It recounts how bloggers imagined a revolution in their writing long before the actual political events of 2011; how they relate to the uprisings in their blog; how blogs have evolved in the years after 2011, and what is left of the blog in Arabic literary production. Here it shows that blogging continues to be an important phenomenon in the Arab world, even though blogging practices have changed following the spread of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the blog continues to impact Arabic print literature, in terms of young authors’ access to the literary field, their experimentation with language and genre, and the importance of the visual. The novel Istikhdam al-Haya (Using Life, 2014) by Ahmed Naji, mentioned before, and Youssef Rakha’s novel Bawlu (Paulo, 2016) are analysed to discuss the link between the blog, the dystopic novel and new literary styles in Egypt.


Author(s):  
Patrick Scott Belk

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.


Werkwinkel ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Lucie Sedláčková

Abstract This article is based on the belief that in every historical period, there is a certain part of the literary production that reflects the recent events or tendencies in the contemporary society. Using my dissertation, in which I did research on the representations of the globalisation in recent Dutch and Flemish fiction, as an example of which issues were or were not represented in a number of selected Dutch-written novels, I point out that ecology, which turned to be a non-issue in my corpus, deserves new attention at this moment. My article suggests some attitudes that can help to interpret the ecological issues and the tightly connected subject of animal rights. The new challenges for the literary studies are first of all presented by the ecocriticism and the (critical) animal studies


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Mônica Fernanda Rodrigues Gama

Resumo: Quando um autor expõe suas leituras e o modo como avalia diferentes práticas literárias, ele oferece uma oportunidade de compreendermos particularidades da prática literária, percebidas a partir de um ponto de vista interno. Mais que curiosa, essa visão interna nos dá pistas de mecanismos e escolhas relativas à percepção de valores literários. Os escritores, agentes literários dotados de um singular capital simbólico, podem perceber, elucidar e avaliar a literatura de seus contemporâneos, associando suas assinaturas aos nomes dos que desejam integrar o campo literário, por meio da crítica literária, desdobrando-se em um escritor-crítico. Outra forma de intervenção no campo literário por parte de escritores é a participação como jurados de concursos de literatura, cumprindo então um papel avaliativo. Guimarães Rosa não fazia crítica literária publicamente. Negava-se, sobretudo, a comentar seus contemporâneos, mas publicou textos em que ficcionalizou escritores, apresentando-os criticamente. Além desse jogo lúdico, pouco comentado (talvez pelo tom enigmático da brincadeira), exerceu em seus manuscritos algumas facetas de escritor-crítico, como vemos em suas anotações como jurado do prêmio Walmap (1966). Neste artigo, abordaremos textos sobre o concurso Humberto de Campos (1937), quando Guimarães Rosa foi julgado por Graciliano Ramos, e as anotações do prêmio Walmap, quando o autor mineiro assume o lugar de avaliador, observando quais critérios são reatualizados pelos dois escritores para a compreensão de seus contemporâneos. Além disso, abordaremos os poucos textos assinados por Guimarães Rosa para apresentar escritores estreantes, nos quais podemos perceber outro éthos autoral em cena.Palavras-chave: Guimarães Rosa; concursos literários; Graciliano Ramos; escritores-críticos.Abstract: When a writer exposes their readings and their way of analysing different literary productions, we have in hands a probing opportunity to comprehend particularities of the literary practice experienced by an inner point of view. More than curious, such point of view evidences mechanisms and choices related to the perception of literary values. Writers, as literary agents skilled with a symbolic and unique power, can elucidate, apprehend, and analyse their coeval colleagues’ literature. By becoming critical writers, they associate, through literary criticism, their character with the names of those who want to be part of the literary field. Another way for writers to act in the literary field is by being judges on literary contests, assuming an evaluative characteristic. Publicly, Guimarães Rosa was not a literary critic. He repudiated to comment his coetaneous colleagues. However, Rosa published texts in which he critically presented fictional authors. Besides this ludic game (uncommented probably due to his enigmatic game), he practiced some critical-writer aspects in his manuscripts, as in his notes on the Walmap Contest (1966), in which he was a judge. In this paper, we assess texts about both the Humberto de Campos Contest (1937) and the Walmap Contest, when Rosa took on the judge position. Our objective is to observe which criteria are revisited by both the authors to comprehend their coeval colleagues. At the same time, we analyse the few texts Rosa used to introduce the newcomer writers. In these few texts, we can perceive a different authorial ethos on the scene.Keywords: Guimarães Rosa; literary contests; Graciliano Ramos; critical writers.


Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 115-122
Author(s):  
Victor Cobuz

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Tamaki

Translations are shaped by publishing strategies developed by publishers and literary agents among others. However, little research has been carried out on the activities of literary agents within a particular language culture. This paper aims to describe contemporary Japanese publishing strategies in certain book categories by focusing on the role played by the literary agent. Polysystem theory and Toury’s methodology reveal that translation usually occupies a peripheral position in contemporary Japanese culture. Information drawn from an interview with a literary agent indicates that publishers exercise a great deal of influence: from initiating a translation project to micro‑managing textual details. The results of this research, reflected in both paratextual and textual features, suggest that the peripheral position of translation in Japan largely determines how translated books are produced.


Author(s):  
Clayton Childress

This chapter examines why Cornelia Nixon fired her literary agent after the success of her novel Now You See It. It first provides an overview of literary magazines, which provided a contact point between unknown authors and literary agents who might read their works and help them in the field of production, before explaining how the role of literary agents has developed over time, and how they go about their work of constructing bridges across the divide between the fields of creation and production. Although Nixon's agent had successfully placed Now You See It, the chapter shows that Nixon increasingly worried that there were other meaningful things the agent did not see or do. Nixon decided to look for another agent and found Wendy Weil, who had spent twenty-five years in book publishing before founding her own literary agency in 1986.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Eric Sandberg

Crime fiction laboured for many years under a persistent foundational anxiety over its cultural status. However, the cultural landscape has changed considerably in recent years, and many critics have identified a transformation in crime fiction's positioning as central to this transformation. This essay examines this claim by first looking at several ways in which crime fiction works well with a number of recent attempts to described key tendencies in contemporary literary production including its global view, its interest in the past, and its interstitial nature. It then locates crime fiction within the process known in Russian formalist terms as ‘canonization of the junior branch’ by which lower-status genres influence or indeed replace higher-status genres. Finally, in an attempt to trace the extent of this infiltration, the essay examines book reviews, festivals, and literary prizes for evidence that crime fiction has indeed achieved improved status both within a range of national cultures and internationally.


1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 644-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Emmons
Keyword(s):  
Big Five ◽  

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