Introduction: Market Matters

Abstract

Introduction: Market Matters Christine HenseUr, Associate Professor of Spanish (Union College), and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Associate Professor of Spanish , (University of Michigan , Ann Arbor) are the guest editors of this special section, Market Matters. Their respective research investigates the significance of the book market and the commodity exchanges that govern it. In this collection they present a gamut of perspectives to examine Hispanic publishing inside and outside the literary as the intertwined manifestation of both commercial and aesthetic values. Why does the market occupy such a prominent position in literary and cultural studies? Is it possible to talk about literary production today without addressing the market forces in our global economy? This collection throws light on these questions by offering a wide-ranging reflection on the market in Spanish and Latin American literature from the turn of the twentieth century onwards . It is a timely topic particularly if we take into account that mega-mergers like the mighty Bertelsmann media group (which comprises publishing firms such as Random House, Knopf, Sudamericana, Planeta, and Seix Barrai, to name a few) have reshaped the world of publishing and transformed it to meet the expansionary practices that are now commonplace in our global economy. In recent years, several works have looked into the cultural market's economic forces in an effort to explain how new literary trends come about and establish and impose "new" literary canons in the book market. It is worth mentioning André Schiffrin's critically acclaimed The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000), which also appeared in Spanish translation as La edición sin editores (2000). Schiffrin argues that in this age of mass media consumerism publishers worldwide have succumbed to the demands of the global market and thus abandoned the loftier goals of traditional publishers as guarantors of cultural production. His dire predictions for the global book market are particularly troubling for small presses that compete with media conglomerates like the Bertelsmann group. In the field of Hispanism scholarly works have recently picked up some Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 114 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies of the questions raised by Schiffrin's book. In 2001 Revista iberoamericana published a special issue entitled Mercados, editoriales y difusión de discursos culturaks en América Latina (Daroqui and Cróquer). This collection examines the expansion of mass-marketed media products in Latin America and its consequences for the publishing industry, the literary market, and the political and cultural discourses in the region. Similarly, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies published in 2003 a special issue on the economies of cultural production which addresses not only the questions raised by the global cultural market but also by the abundance of economic terms in rhe field of literary studies (Highfill). The essays in this special issue of AJHCS, while they touch upon some of the questions brought forward in previous scholarship, do take the market a step further. Our contributors propose (albeit from different theoretical approaches) that the market does matter not only for the commercial distribution of literature but also for its ramifications in the literary realm. It is often the case that scholarly works on the broad topic of the book market look to provide figures and statistics on revenues, but forget that the literary realm—particularly when driven by an aggressive market—"takes over" the market by representing fictional (and not so fictional) cultural producers such as editors, prize organizers, agents, and the like. Without setting aside the importance of economics or aesthetic agendas that control a specific literary field, Market Matters examines both die exchanges among cultural producers and the exchanges portrayed in literary works that define the economic processes leading to a work of literature, thus looking at the internal and external forces that define the literary marker and its economic exchanges. In mapping out these exchanges, our conrributors examine the literary market in its many facets: authorship, copyright, commerce, promotion, finance, taste, distribution , inventories, stocks, postcolonial enterprise, ownership, and material culture. In sum, this collection investigates the inner workings of the Hispanic book trade and its literary ramifications in an attempt...