The serial fantasy novel, a genre that now commands its own established realm within bookshops and best-seller lists, was born – in Dan Sinykin’s telling – from a mass-market editor’s innovative response to the demands of conglomerate publishers for more reliable sales (10). The early-1980s move by the National Endowment for the Arts to an anonymous judging process for literature fellowships, argues Alexander Manshel, obliged a literary work’s historical setting to stand in for authorial identity, leading “ethnicized history” to function “as a kind of proxy” for the organization’s contemporaneous commitment to minoritized writers and thereby moving the historical novel closer to the centre of the canon (72–74). Imbolo Mbue became an author, Anna Muenchrath notes, after finding Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon on an Oprah’s Book Club-branded bookshelf, and treated the book club’s picks as a “curriculum” as she honed her craft (147).

Each of these claims suggests different ways in which literary institutions have shaped the formation of genres, literary canons, and authorship in the postwar era. These three accomplished and deeply researched new books each examine the relationship between literary institutions and literary forms (predominantly the novel); all three are framed as histories of the present, tracking postwar developments in publishing, academia and prize culture in a way that accounts for the state of the contemporary field.

The genealogies of these books are multiple and overlapping, but all three sit within the Venn diagram comprising what has been variously termed literary sociology, New Institutionalism, and “New US Publishing Studies.”Footnote ¹ Sinykin’s and Manshel’s monographs have already been heralded as the coming of age within literary studies of a sociological approach that draws much of its inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu.Footnote ² “Sociology” is a vexingly capacious term in the definition of this approach, but it broadly concerns a sustained interest in “the production and circulation of literary texts” (as Daniel King put it in an earlier review in this venue, of this reviewer’s work).Footnote ³ Much of the energy of this approach has concentrated within what Jeremy Rosen describes as the “institutional turn”;Footnote ⁴ this names the increasing attention to the organizations and practices that mediate literary production, occupying what Simone Murray has recently termed the “meso level” of culture.Footnote ⁵ Finally, Sarah Brouillette’s related definition of the “New US Publishing Studies” identifies the generationally specific factors driving much research into contemporary publishing. A cohort of scholars has built upon indispensable works by the likes of Mark McGurl, James English, and Janice Radway as well as the rapid assimilation of data-led methods into humanities scholarship, within – and, indeed, provoked by – the context of interrelated crises of precarity and inequality in academia and the culture industries.

Sinykin’s book is the most ambitious treatment yet in literary studies of the process of conglomeration and its effects. The era of publishing conglomeration is one that Sinykin dates from 1960, when relatively small and privately held publishing houses (often founder-led, and functioning like “big families” (4)) began to be bought up by larger communications companies and transformed – sometimes gradually, sometimes with immediate upheaval – into the consolidated, vertically integrated, shareholder-value-maximizing entities now commonly referred to as the “Big 5.” The book’s corporate history, building on essential publishing histories by John B. Thompson and others, lays the groundwork for its more novel literary-critical gambit, namely the claim that the last sixty-odd years of literary history should be understood as the “conglomerate era,” and that this era can be traced in the formal effects upon the fiction published within (and even outside) the ever-decreasing number of major publishing houses.

The book’s chapters track the major market categories of US publishing (mass market and trade get two apiece, accompanied by nonprofits and independents); within these, Sinykin amasses a wealth of archival findings, fieldwork, and decades of industry gossip and ephemera to argue that “the logic of industry … shapes the literary field.” Conglomeration “stratified reading,” for example (27), as best sellers and brand-name authors came to be prioritized by major publishers in the 1970s and 1980s; E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime emerges retrospectively as a high-water mark for the commercial success of formally ambitious fiction, as the best-seller list came to be the province of Judith Krantz, Michael Crichton, and Danielle Steel. The story of Steel is one of the most vivid ones here, and perhaps the most effective example of the now established technique in which a work of literature is taken to allegorize the conditions of its own production. Steel’s early promise as a struggling literary writer was noticed by Dell’s editor in chief, Bill Grose, who set about parlaying her talent into the burgeoning genre of popular romance (47–50). The fictions that Steel wrote for Dell, argues Sinkyin – in particular the facial-reconstruction romantic drama The Promise (1978) – allegorize the process by which she was repackaged for the mass market as well as the resulting struggle for authorial “authenticity” (50–51).

This dynamic holds not just for writers of commercial fiction, but also for canonical literary authors such as Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, whose complex and decidedly less market-friendly novels nevertheless display an alignment with the turn towards genre. These readings of literary classics have proven to be more contentious, since they not only risk simplifying questions of authorial motivation and agency, but also show Sinykin’s overarching claims coming into tension with what is arguably the complex interplay of agency revealed by the book’s particular case studies.Footnote ⁶ Some of the resistance to Sinykin’s readings is surely a question of form; the book’s structure and style are lucid, and the snappy prose often feels as if it is mimicking the business reports and the Martini-drenched literary lunches it describes (in Big Fiction, publishers don’t lose their jobs, but get “canned” (2, 119, 172)). This makes for a brisk and entertaining read, but it can have the effect of making the close readings feel underdeveloped. Nevertheless, the book’s thesis retains significant explanatory power, and the chapters on nonprofit publishers and handful of remaining large independents such as Norton and Farrar, Straus and Giroux reveal the range of possibilities for adaptation and evolution within conglomerate-era publishing, convincingly demonstrating how non-conglomerate publishers exist and adapt in tension with (and in relation to) the market dominance of the big players.

Manshel’s book proposes a thesis that also seems to have been hiding in plain sight. The book narrates the story of how “the past came to supplant the present in contemporary American fiction” (4) – or, at least (an essential qualification), within the more “literary” strand of contemporary fiction around which prestige tends to accumulate. By this, Manshel means the remarkable ascendancy of the historical novel in publishing catalogues, prize listings, syllabi, and literary scholarship. The book’s formal argument is thus primarily derived from attention to institutions; rather than focussing on one specific institution, it “traces the continuous feedback loop” between publishing houses, universities, and organizations that create and consolidate literary prestige, in a “dynamic circulatory system of aesthetic value” (9–10). The analysis incorporates late twentieth-century intellectual currents (particularly the intense methodological debates about historicism), the related push to diversify curricula, and a broadly shared interpretive investment in “the recuperative power of historical reconstruction.” Manshel concludes that “historical fiction, and historical fiction by minoritized writers in particular, emerged as the ideal literary form to mediate between these disparate factions and interests” (50, 26).

The emphasis here frequently leans towards the university – like Sinykin, Manshel is keen to historicize the reading habits of the professoriate – prompting observations that will likely be recognizable to anyone who has ever designed a survey syllabus. The concept of “teachability” comes to exert a distinct pressure on the developing literary canon here, since the qualities that make a novel legible and explicable within its historical context are ones prized not just by the university classroom but by institutions and reading communities such as book clubs and prize committees. In both the “seminar room” and the “living room,” “reading to learn and reading to feel have become increasingly intertwined” (168, original emphasis), with the result that genres like the multigenerational family novel – particularly those that dramatize historically marginalized experiences – become particularly attractive both to ambitious novelists and to literary institutions.

The syllabus figures here as a key literary form, both as an influence upon historical fiction’s development and as an organizing principle for critics and writers who may themselves be occasional teachers (and creatures of the university). In perhaps the book’s finest chapter, Manshel offers a rewarding reading of Colson Whitehead’s career in which The Intuitionist (1999) becomes a history of academic discourse informed by the author’s 1990s Harvard education (in which John Guillory and Henry Louis Gates loom large). Manshel convincingly reads Whitehead’s oeuvre as its own career-long syllabus, unified by a thesis about representation and historical memory that draws from Toni Morrison’s delineation of the US racial imaginary. The central role of Morrison in both Sinykin and Manshel’s books is worth noting, particularly given the attention afforded to her in other institutionally focussed recent works by Richard Jean So and Evan Brier, not to mention Dana A. Williams’s history of Morrison as editor;Footnote ⁷ this is a reflection not just of Morrison’s hyper-canonical status, but of the rich terrain of her career for literary sociologists (who can consider her alternately as author, editor, prizewinner, critic, scholarly focal point, and syllabus stalwart). While Sinykin focusses on Beloved’s incorporation of Gothic elements as a precursor to the literary “genre turn,” Manshel’s analysis positions the book’s marriage of historical fiction and modernist technique as key to its lasting institutional acceptance.

Muenchrath’s Making World Literature shares an interest in literary institutions, and in many of the specific scenes of institutionalization – prize nominations, editorial desks, the classroom – that concern Sinykin and Manshel, although the differences in its approach serve as an instructive counterpoint. Muenchrath’s models are multiple: she deploys Bourdieu’s notion of the literary “field” alongside a sense of the “network,” as derived from Bruno Latour, as a way to pursue “the republication of texts into new contexts” and trace how the text’s new contexts “might transform the field and reorganize its positions” (5–7). The recurring concern here is how institutions “translate between the many and the one,” performing “acts of selection” that shape and reshape particular canons with particular groups of imagined readers in mind (7).

As the title suggests, the book’s interest lies in how US institutions have mediated what has come to be broadly defined (in a crude but inescapable formulation) as “world literature.” Muenchrath examines how these acts of selection, aggregation, and positioning have managed and framed an enormous variety of global literary texts during an era in which US readers (and the institutions that represent and cater to them) came to acquire immense economic and cultural power. In chapters on the history of US-published anthologies of world literature (seen as complex “arena(s) of worlding” (21)), Iowa’s International Writing Program (which made Iowa an “unlikely hub in a world literary network” (88)), and Amazon’s publication of translated literature through its Amazon Crossing imprint, theoretical models of the network (and, specifically, actor-network theory) are deployed to support longitudinal studies in which agency is shared and distributed in unpredictable ways. Making World Literature’s chapter on the Council of Books in Wartime, and the Armed Services Editions it produced for soldiers stationed abroad during World War II, gives a particularly rich sense of the institution as an organizing force that is itself dynamic and subject to constant reshaping by a complex range of “pressures and motivations” that influenced selection and circulation (67).

Elsewhere, Muenchrath describes Oprah’s book club as “both a mirror and a mechanism of global literary circulation” (118); these case studies show an ongoing attentiveness to the ways in which organizations can serve as a reflection of, locus of, and catalyst for larger contending forces to reshape literary culture. As the book approaches the present, its engagement with data collection both as method and as object of study produces some startling insights about search algorithms (elaborated upon further by Muenchrath elsewhere)Footnote ⁸ and the “self-reinforcing world literary network” they create. The chapter on Amazon’s foray into the publishing of literature in translation, and the Crossing imprint’s development into “the largest publisher of translations into English in the world” (151), shows how the publisher targets “segmented audiences not only categorized but produced by its own algorithms” (165, original emphasis). Given the historic reluctance of anglophone publishers to commit to translated writing at scale, the chapter points towards publishing formations that seem genuinely novel, and assimilable to existing models of neither economic nor cultural capital.

All three of these books have a determinedly presentist orientation; each is a largely twentieth-century focussed literary-historical study, but – as the conclusions to each indicate – they share a sense of the urgency of this history for the contemporary concerns of authors and publishing workers (Sinykin), the political “assault on narratives of history” (Manshel, 243), and indeed the increasingly precaritized professariat tracing these histories (Muenchrath).

One clear point of convergence lies in each author’s attention to how minoritized experience is commodified within the literary field, and, as a consequence, how marginalized writers negotiate racialized expectations. Manshel, for example, argues that historical fiction is now “the primary locus of racial diversity in contemporary American literature.” This partial program of “selective elevation,” he notes, “may now work to circumscribe minoritized writers, even as it consecrates them” (5, 18, 31). This claim parallels Big Fiction’s readings of works by Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita, in which Sinykin argues that these writers work to resist their own commodification and conscription into liberal narratives of progress through literary strategies such as satire (153–64).Footnote ⁹ In Making World Literature, Muenchrath attends to how literary institutions – Oprah’s Book Club, for example – construct and grapple with the sense of otherness encountered in literature from national and linguistic traditions from outside the US. Her reading of the “nationalist, therapeutic rhetoric” in the book club’s methods of reading international authors, and of the tensions evinced by the “self-consciously self-critical” tone that intrudes upon that rhetoric (143–46), point up the implicit exceptionalism underlying the institution’s understanding of its own identity.

Muenchrath’s book is a particularly valuable counterpoint here in its consistent application of the world-literary frame to the operations of US literary and cultural institutions, as well as in the productive heterogeneity of its methods and subjects. The book’s organizing logic is as much methodological as topical, a fact that constitutes both a strength and weakness (the question of why these specific case studies appear together is never fully explained). However, this also makes the book less intent on prosecuting one overarching argument for the varied phenomena it surveys, and less invested in providing a totalizing explanation of the role and impact of specific institutions. These tensions around method and narrative form recur in criticisms of institutionalist scholarship, and indicate what are likely to be key questions for future work.

Indeed, all three books point in different ways to one key precursor, Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), whose touchstone status for this wave of literary-sociological criticism provides an essential background to recent debates around the methods and scholarly collectives around which some of these works have been formed.Footnote ¹⁰ McGurl’s systems-oriented approach oscillates between large-scale models of aesthetic formations and close readings that instantiate those formations in microcosm; the dizzying shifts in scale between close readings and historical materialism are held together through the achievement of its virtuosically self-reflexive, pedagogical, and “charming” voice.Footnote ¹¹ If the rewards of this approach are clear, then the risks are also significant. The broad-brush theorizing and confident glide between the macro and micro levels of inquiry risk allowing the structural analysis to overpower the literary, and indeed to underplay the intricacy and contested nature of the “meso” spaces in between. While Big Fiction asserts the dynamism of the publishing sphere, its commitment to a totalizing model risks (as Rosen puts it) “hypostasiz[ing] a dynamic field into a static system with fixed logic”;Footnote ¹² in Writing Backwards, the book’s determining category of the historical novel comes under increasing pressure as the present approaches, threatening to break down in its deliberately anachronistic definition of the “recent historical novel” (205–12).

Sinykin’s systemic analysis of the clusters of literary forms and genres produced within conglomerate publishing, Manshel’s attention to the shaping role of the classroom in genre formation, and indeed Muenchrath’s sustained attention to Iowa’s creative-writing programme as a scene of world-literary creation all indicate a specific debt to McGurl’s landmark study. Making World Literature, however, gestures usefully towards other critical genealogies that do not hew as closely to this model. It works, in fact, from a tradition that is more recognizable as book history, a disciplinary formation that trains much of its attention on how books are produced, circulated, and received by readers; this approach is more comfortable with the distributed agency outlined in frameworks such as Robert Darnton’s influential “communications circuit” for books (a diagram reproduced here in Muenchrath’s introduction), and is a little less invested in the virtuosic close reading as the primary scene of interpretation.

Reading these books together reveals both the vitality of the subfield and the questions with which it is grappling. The next wave of literary-sociological research might fruitfully interrogate some of the critical templates it has inherited; it might also devote more prolonged attention to the international connections, encounters, and translations that are often pushed to the side by the nation-centred framework of US literary study.Footnote ¹³ Considering US institutions in a global context might thereby help to reveal their imbrication in larger systems, and also – paradoxically – show what makes them distinctively American.