Institutional Recognition in the Transnational Literary Field, 1955–2005

Abstract

Contributing to research on social processes of cultural de-hierarchization, this article explores how critical recognition in elite newspapers is related to the recognition that authors receive from other agents in the literary field in the past half-century. We distinguish four types of institutional recognition: (a) long-term recognition in literary encyclopedias, (b) short-term recognition through literary awards, (c) recognition through bestseller list success, and (d) recognition through the prestige of publishers. Our study uses a sample of articles from 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005 in French, German, Dutch and US elite papers ( N=2,419), as well as further information on the extent to which fiction book authors discussed in the newspaper sample received the above forms of institutional recognition. We conduct cluster analysis to inductively establish how these forms of recognition are related, and multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict membership of clusters. Throughout the period 1955–2005 we consistently find three author categories: the unrecognized, the contemporary prestigious, and the historical prestigious. Countries differ, however, in the extent to which these categories are represented in newspaper literary coverage. Our analysis of factors determining membership of these clusters points to the lasting importance of symbolic capital, but also to the transnational nature of institutional recognition as local and international recognition show highly similar patterns.