Conglomerate but not Homogenized

Abstract

AbstractThe essays collected in “Literature and Publishing, 1945–2020” consider the ways the conglomerated global publishing industry has incorporated and commodified varied genres and target publics. The essays employ intensive archival, ethnographic, and computational methods, and they dive into often-neglected genres, in order to fill in this familiar narrative outline with vivid detail, complicating it and at times discovering countervailing trends that persist within conglomerate publishing’s pursuit of short-term economic profit. While the contributors tend to emphasize the dominance of an increasingly homogenizing corporate aesthetic inimical to experiment, they also acknowledge the potential for individual writers, editors, and agents to intervene in the market, shifting and diversifying the field and preserving literary values, even as they attend to the fiscal bottom line. This commentary stresses the variability of genre, publishers’ persistent search for novelty, and conglomerates’ desire to compete for prestige with small but influential independent presses in order to explain the continued efflorescence of a dazzling diversity of contemporary literary production within a field that continues to consolidate dramatically at its top end, and whose retail side is dominated by a single behemoth.