Abstract
Literary Misfortunes. The development of reading in popular milieux was accompanied by the emergence of a very low-value position in the literary field. Contrary to the common belief that the career of popular novelist results from an initial, deliberate choice inspired by sheer appetite for mercenary gain, analysis shows that relegation to this illegitimate, but still hierarchically structured, sector of cultural production is the outcome and the mark of previous failure. By observing the social characteristics and the trajectories of popular novelists, one is able to identify a contrario the objective laws of success in the literary field : the writers initially best endowed with economie and/or social capital are those most capable of avoiding identification of their perso n with this low-value form of production and of producing the «quality-popular» literature which has the least popular readership.
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