SARAH BROUILLETTE. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace.

In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette expands on Graham Huggan’s exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent to postcolonialism and “the language of commerce” intrinsic to postcoloniality (Huggan, 2001: 264). Connecting the successful marketing of postcolonial writing with the regime of postcoloniality, Brouillette argues that such a regime requires or projects a “biographical connection” (2007: 4) between text and author so that even postcolonial fiction can be thought of as offering a supposedly authentic or unmediated access to the cultural other. This article discusses Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. My aim is to show how this memoir is very much concerned with the relationship between postcolonialism and postcoloniality even as it foregrounds issues of genre, authorship, and (af)filiation. Highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any referential pact (see Lejeune, 1975), My Ear at His Heart not only complicates the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures, the memoir also alludes to the reception of Kureishi’s own work, which was framed by “autobiographical” readings of his early novels. Through an analysis of the ways in which My Ear at His Heart re-places issues of postcoloniality and genre at the heart of the father–son relationship, I wish to suggest that Kureishi still has “something to tell us” about the commodification of “minority” cultures, provided that postcolonial scholarship starts taking issues of form seriously.

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Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace

10.1057/9780230114791 ◽

2010 ◽

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

Literary Marketplace

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Pamela

10.1093/owc/9780199536498.001.0001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Samuel Richardson

Keyword(s):

Young Girl ◽

Original Text ◽

Literary Marketplace ◽

Defining Moment ◽

Modern Novel ◽

The World ◽

The Voice

‘Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Families, and when she gets there, what Scenes does she represent? Why a fine young Gentleman endeavouring to debauch a beautiful young Girl of Sixteen.’ (Pamela Censured, 1741) One of the most spectacular successes of the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteeent-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world ‘into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists’, even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached up for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant’s long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, but by a printer who fifteen years earlier had narrowly escaped imprisonment for the seditious output of his press, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse. Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.

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Economies of Prestige and the Editorial Program Era: Literary Sociology and Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875821000037 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 502-507

Author(s):

DANIEL ROBERT KING

Keyword(s):

History Of The Book ◽

First Century ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Turn Of The Millennium ◽

Literary Production ◽

Literary Marketplace ◽

History Of ◽

Literary Sociology ◽

Significant Figures ◽

Sociological Studies

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.

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“No more little boxes” – Poetic Positionings in the Literary Field

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ◽

10.1515/zaa-2020-2031 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 69 (1) ◽

pp. 91-104

Author(s):

Stefanie Mueller

Keyword(s):

Literary Marketplace ◽

Literary Field ◽

The Us ◽

Unites States

AbstractMy 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.”

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