Publishing, even among culture industries, is notoriously sleepy as a capitalist enterprise. Many enter the field—and take spiritual compensation in lieu of higher pay, shaping employee demographics—because they love literature. Depending on one’s taste, this is a commitment sometimes in conflict with maximizing profits. The story of the industry’s last fifty years has been about the steady rationalization of this fundamentally chaotic business, driven by conglomerate consolidation, the shareholder value revolution, and top-down demands for quarterly growth. Literature finds itself, as it long has, poised between capitalism and aesthetics, learning to accommodate—through everything from intensified investment in brand names to literary fiction’s adoption of genre techniques—the persistent encroachment of the former. (I detail the far-reaching consequences for literary history in my book Big Fiction.)
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