Literature's Social Lives - A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value

This book draws from literary sociology to look at literature in a longue durée (from Romantic poetry to the Toni-Morrison novel). It proposes a new value theory, and sketches an institutional history of US and Anglophone literary culture from 1800 to the present. Its bifocal institutional and value-theoretical lens offers a fresh look at literary production, explaining the tension of vocation and trade regimes since 1800; the relevance of subsidies to authors of high literary ambition; the network-dependency of avant-gardes and identity groups; the institutional prerequisites of world-literary iconicity, and the diversification and ranking of reading cultures.