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.

Literary Agency

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.

Criminal Peripheries: The Globalization of Scandinavian Crime Fiction and Its Agents

In the twenty-first century, the extraordinary success of Scandinavian crime fiction in translation has challenged long-held assumptions about the hierarchy of nations, languages and genres in global publishing. This chapter assesses the ‘Scandinavian publishing miracle’ by considering various consecration processes (e.g. literary prizes), domestic changes brought to the publishing field towards the end of the last century (e.g. literary agents and the regional publishing field) and the dynamics of translation and promotion of Scandinavian crime fiction with a focus on the UK market since 2000. The chapter presents a case study of Henning Mankell’s impact on the international market – a case which also demonstrates that the Scandinavian twenty-first-century publishing phenomenon is the tip of an iceberg hiding strategic coordinated practices between small-nation actors established in the early 1990s, which provided a ‘marginocentric’ model for how literatures from small European nations could successfully enter the international mainstream.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

This essay is based on a talk the author gave at the By the Book conference in Florence in June 2019. It examines the power dynamics in the Italian publishing world from the perspective of a fiction writer. Writing and publishing are two completely different worlds that can be differently approached. What’s the point of writing? Should writers write about what they know, or about what they do not know? Can publishing be put off? What’s the role of literary agents in the publishing process? The author’s answers to these questions are based on her personal experience.

Realism and the Profession of Authorship

This chapter examines tensions between authorship and publishing in the era of American literary realism. The publishing industry changed with the emergence of literary agents, the growing financial significance of magazines and syndication, and the increasingly influential role of publishing-house editors. All were signs of a centralizing and marketizing publishing system flexible enough to withstand changes in dominant literary genres, tastes, and fashions. With examples from the careers of well- and lesser-known realists—William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles Chesnutt—authorship remained stubbornly immune to professionalization, in part because writing is better considered as a craft than as a profession and in part because the practices creating authorship’s marketization did not require its professionalization.

From Idea to Book

What are agents and what do they do? Agents, also sometimes called “literary agents,” in the book business represent authors in their business interactions with publishers. The biggest publishers get nearly all their books through agents, so agents are effectively both scouts for new...

Caminhos da consagração: Guimarães Rosa e o julgamento crítico

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.