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

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TimGroenland, The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, £95.00). Pp. 288. isbn978 1 5013 3827 4.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

DANIEL ROBERT KING*
Affiliation:
College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby. Email: danking86@googlemail.com.

Extract

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.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2021

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References

1 Sutherland, John, “Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology,” Critical Inquiry, 14, 3, The Sociology of Literature (Spring, 1988), 574–89, 574CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Liu, Alan, “From Reading to Social Computing,” in Price, Kenneth M. and Siemens, Ray, eds., Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology (MLA Commons, Modern Language Association of America, 2013)Google Scholar, available at http://dlsanthology.commons.mla.org/from-reading-to-social-computing.

3 English, James F., The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGurl, Mark, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, John B., Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Glass, Loren, After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Crosthwaite, Paul, The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, David D., ed, A History of the Book in America, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000–14)Google Scholar.

4 Sutherland, 575.