Description
Book SynopsisEvery writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, showing how the business of literature affects even storytelling devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. In this new model of criticism, the text is a record of its author’s sales pitch.
Trade ReviewThis is a remarkable, pathbreaking book. I found myself consistently challenged and engaged by its arguments. The book is most impressive in its suggestions as to how economic concerns are represented through strictly literary devices. Paine shows how works are shaped by their authors’ position in regard to literary value. He fascinatingly recasts what it means to read
The Brothers Karamazov, and offers a genuinely new approach to Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Zola. -- Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley
Paine’s survey of these three novelists is masterful…As he depicts them, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola are neither puppets of an inexorable free market nor puppeteers of their readers’ false consciousness. Instead, Paine shows how economic concerns, as one guiding force among many, influenced their creative impulses, but did not—in naive Marxian fashion—overdetermine them…[A] considerable achievement. -- Marta Figlerowicz * Public Books *
Jonathan Paine provides a breath of fresh air for nineteenth-century fiction studies, especially for studies of Dostoevsky. -- William Mills Todd III, Harvard University
Scrupulously situates each text within its historical context and adroitly mobilizes pertinent histories of finance and business…effectively demonstrates the importance of social, cultural, and economic history for literary analysis. -- Erika Vause * Journal of Modern History *
An interesting, well-written consideration of important relationships between authors and their public in the 19th century. * Choice *
