Epistolary craft and the literary field

Abstract

This essay examines the epistolary craft of Monica Ali’s bestselling first novel, Brick Lane (2003), drawing on tools offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. On one hand, the novel’s relation with its source texts, and attempt to forge an adequate literary material for banglabhashi (Bengali speaking) and oral narratives, signals a rejection of economic profit and pursuit of symbolic capital. On the other, Ali faces the overwhelming market demand for an accessible, marketable and saleable ‘big book’ for the English-language reader. The lack of fit between the spontaneous spoken language of the material that Ali attempts to present and the epistolary conventions that she uses, is subordinated to the need to conform with market requirements, masking what is a more challenging literary work than critics have allowed for. The ambition to present non-written and non-anglophone elements through English-language epistolarity therefore remains latent in the novel, but is ultimately traduced to the logic of the field of anglophone trade-publishing.