Synopses & Reviews
"The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions," write the editors of this volume. "It is not an established field or academic discipline. . . . Yet none of these limitations affect the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise."
Convinced that literature and society are essentially related to each other, the contributors to this collection attempt to define the various sociological practices of literature and to give expression to this enterprise and the commitments of its partisans. In various ways, the essays assembled here seek to integrate text, institution, and individual (both author and critic) as necessary parts of the analysis of literature. Diverse, sometimes contradictory approaches to literature (Marxism, publishing history, new historicism, and others) are utilized as the contributors explore such topics as text, author-function, and appropriation; the reality of representation; the sociology of exchange; the uses of "serious" fiction; poetry and politics; publishing history; and the literary field.
Table of Contents
Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on the Sociology of Literature
Sociology of Literature in Retrospect by Leo Lowenthal
Response to Leo Lowenthal by Lewis A. Coser
Text, Author-Function, and Appropriation in Modern Narrative: Toward a Sociology of Representation by Robert Weimann
Reading Revolutionary Paris by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac by Sandy Petrey
Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature by Terry Eagleton
Moliere and the Sociology of Exchange by Jean-Marie Apostolides
"News, and new Things": Contemporaneity and the Early English Novel by J. Paul Hunter
Literary Field and Classes of Text by Jacques Dubois and Pascal Durand
The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On the Uses of "Serious" Fiction by Janice Radway
Cultural Production as Routine: Some Thoughts on "America's Bookstore" by Walter W. Powell
Poetry and Politics: Lamartine's Revolutions by Philippe Desan
Flaubert's Point of View by Pierre Bourdieu
Kafka's Place in the Literary Field by Regine Robin
Prismatic Effects by Alain Viala
Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology by John Sutherland
Response to John Sutherland by G. Thomas Tanselle
Index