Virago’s Place in the New Millennium’s Literary Marketplace

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-138
Keyword(s):  
Literary Marketplace

Pamela

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Ball's Bluff

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1582-1599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Friedlander
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Local Newspapers

Emily Dickinson's response to the Civil War—once discounted as nonexistent or negligible, now embraced as part of the canon of Civil War writing—gives evidence of a conscious testing of alternatives. Among these alternatives, the most surprising, perhaps, is her potentially public positioning of herself as a war poet in works that celebrate military heroism. One such celebration, “When I was small, a Woman died—,” written in the aftermath of Ball's Bluff—a disastrous Union loss—revises the scenarios presented in two other Ball's Bluff poems and transforms the horrific death of a local soldier into a glorious ascent into the heavens, an uncharacteristically joyous response to an event that others (including Herman Melville) experienced as entirely mournful. Since the two other poems appeared in her local newspapers and since the soldier was Amherst's first casualty, Dickinson's poem is likely a carefully crafted bid for publication. Read in this way, moreover, “When I was small” reminds us that war presents a poet with unique rhetorical problems but also with opportunities, and that these opportunities can be tempting even for a writer as resistant to the literary marketplace as Dickinson.

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