The Novel as Commodity: Rewiring Book History

Co-sponsored by the Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group and History of Books and Reading Research Group.

Priya Joshi, Professor of English, Temple University, is a book historian and scholar of narrative who has published on the history and theory of popular forms such as the novel and Bollywood cinema. Her guest lecture explores the technologies of production and consumption of the twenty-first century global novel as the novel both summons and frustrates prevailing understanding of the book’s prospects. The digital public sphere has largely rewired how the novel circulates in today’s participatory culture. Fan sites, new writing platforms, and new markets for the novel such as India (hailed as “the biggest English language book-buying market in the world” by The Guardian) have reworked both the scale of the market as well as its accomplices. Big Five publishers play a smaller role as gatekeepers of production, while readers and their passions dominate today to an extent unimagined by the book historian, Robert Darnton. Novels today appear to accrue markets and circulation with viral speed on social media platforms, a mechanism reminiscent of pre-medieval markets with their emphasis on interpersonal exchange and orality.  The “republic of letters” lamented by scholars such as Pascale Casanova for ruthlessly “legislating” literary matters appears today in the hands of readers. Those once sidelined in Darnton’s circuit now are its major players. 

The presentation draws on comparative research from nineteenth-century colonial archives and twenty-first-century publishing in India, the UK, the US and Nigeria.  It offers a model for theorizing how the novel fabricates the contemporary market in which readers claim and command technologies of both production and consumption. The paper proposes that the social lives of “books” are mediated by technologies but manufactured by consumers who conclusively command circuits far beyond their reach. The paper’s research range establishes that new technologies of circulation and consumption have rendered sharply visible longstanding processes that historically shaped the novel’s success as a global cultural commodity.

Follow this link to find out more about the Group's past events and seminars.