Authors' oeuvres as the backbone of publishers' lists: Studying the literary publishing house after Bourdieu

Abstract

In this article, the term ‘after Bourdieu’ has a threefold significance. In the first place, the main points of Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production will be reviewed briefly together with the way Bourdieu has applied this sociological analysis to book publishing. In the second place, several publications of his followers also dealing with book publishing are discussed, leading to the view that further application of Bourdieu's concepts to literary publishing should take the form of a much more precise study of the way literary publishers exploit the work of authors. A main premise of this article is that the publishing house exerts a powerful guiding influence in this exploitation. To illustrate the various dimensions of this exploitation, results of an empirical study of the composition of the lists of two Dutch publishing houses are presented. This study focussed on the extent to which these houses have succeeded in steadily attracting new, productive authors to their lists.