For many, literature and marketing are considered opposite phenomena. This book discusses cases in which the two are closely connected. It argues that literature is subject to the same mechanisms as other commercial products: our... more
For many, literature and marketing are considered opposite phenomena. This book discusses cases in which the two are closely connected. It argues that literature is subject to the same mechanisms as other commercial products: our experience of literary texts is prefigured by brands, trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. From the early modern period onwards, literary authors and their texts are constantly ‘branded’ and have been both the object and the trailblazer of a complex marketing process. The authors of this volume analyze this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, Branding Books Across the Ages seeks to show how literary scholars understand branding – a phenomenon that has long been intertwined with literature.
BIOGRAPHY Helleke van den Braber holds an endowed chair in Patronage Studies at Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and is director of studies of the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands), where she coordinates MA programmes in ‘Cultural Policy and Patronage’ and ‘Creative Industries’.
Jeroen Dera is Assistant Professor of Dutch Literature at Radboud University. His research concerns contemporary poetry, literature education, and the relation between literature and the media industries.
Jos Joosten is Professor of Dutch Literature at Radboud University. He is a member of the research group SCARAB (Studying Cultural Infrastructure and Reception Across Borders) and has published several articles and books on the theory and practice of literary criticism and book reviewing.
Maarten Steenmeijer is Emeritus Professor of Modern Spanish and Spanish American Literature and Culture at Radboud University, and specializes in reception and translation studies.
The review article systematizes the main achievements in the study of literary societies and associations in Russian and foreign historiography of the 1990s – 2010s, and analyzes approaches to this material within the framework of various... more
The review article systematizes the main achievements in the study of literary societies and associations in Russian and foreign historiography of the 1990s – 2010s, and analyzes approaches to this material within the framework of various disciplines and methodologies. The author puts forwards an institutional approach as the basis for the development of a conceptual and factually rich language for describing literary societies in Russia in the first half of the 19th century. An institutional approach provides an opportunity to link the history of literary associations with broader socio-historical context and to describe the role of literary societies in the formation of the “public sphere” and the civil society in Nineteenth-Century Russia.
В статье систематизированы основные достижения в исследовании литературных обществ и объединений в российской и зарубежной историографии 1990–2010-х годов и проанализированы подходы к изучению этого материала в рамках разных гуманитарных дисциплин и методологий. В качестве основы разработки концептуального и фактологически насыщенного языка описания литературных обществ и объединений в России первой половины XIX века выдвигается институциональный подход, который позволяет связать материал литературных объединений с более широкой социально-исторической проблематикой – определением и описанием «публичной сферы», истории ее формирования и роли в становлении гражданского общества.
This essay uses Charles Taylor's theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of... more
This essay uses Charles Taylor's theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Tay-lor's notion of strong value brings out literature's often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading. Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority , this essay sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of "spatial reading" (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). Looking at developments from the 1780s to the present, I will show how the distinction between spatial and flat reading emerges in the eighteenth century, is transformed by the modernist institutionalization of high-and middlebrow notions of spatial form, and continues to provoke tensions between the civil sphere and the literary artistic field (as the recent scandal around Peter Handke's Nobel Prize attests).
