A novel marketplace : mass culture, the book trade, and postwar American fiction / Evan Brier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brier, Evan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Fiction--Publishing--United States--History--20th century.

Fiction.

Literature publishing--Economic aspects--United States--History--20th century.

Literature publishing.

Authors and publishers--United States--History--20th century.

Authors and publishers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (209 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As television transformed American culture in the 1950's, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels-including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place-Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960's. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction: Selling the Novel in the Age of Mass Culture

Chapter 1. Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: The Making and Marketing of The Sheltering Sky

Chapter 2. The "Incalculable Value of Reading": Fahrenheit 451 and the Paperback Assault on Mass Culture

Chapter 3. Synergy and the Novelist: Simon & Schuster; Time, Inc.; and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Chapter 4. From Novel to Blockbuster: Peyton Place and the Narrative of Cultural Decline

Chapter 5. 1959 and Beyond: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Norman Mailer

Epilogue: Novels Today: Oprah Winfrey, Jonathan Franzen, and the Long Tail

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283889933

1283889935

9780812201444

0812201442

OCLC:

802052849