Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCCI_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415706209_text.3d 6 THE LITERARY AS A CULTURAL INDUSTRY Sarah Brouillette and Christopher Doody Book publishing is often absent from or treated cursorily in cultural industries research. The little research that does consider publishing does not discuss what characterizes and informs the production, circulation and reception of particularly literary titles. At first glance we might explain this lacuna as a matter of disciplines. Cultural industries researchers are mainly working in sociology and in cultural and media studies, whereas those concerned with the specificity of literature work in English faculties. Our chapter questions this divide. In Part I, we note the interrelation between the literary and the cultural industries in the influential oeuvres of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno. Ruthless in his critique of the deadening effects of mass culture, Adorno preserved the possibility that the literary might remain a space apart, where autonomous artistic activity could foster social and political transformation. In Bourdieu’s work there is a comparable desire to set the literary against the reduction of all cultural expression to what he called the “heteronomous field,” where making money and reaching a wide audience trump all other concerns. Their work has unfortunately tended to be read in ways that affirm division rather than interrelation. Literary scholarship has embraced Adorno’s aesthetic theory, whereas research on the cultural industries has tended to critique Adorno’s whole approach as elitist and inimical to its own goals. Cultural industries research has found value in Bourdieu’s models because he treats all culture as a means to acquire and control some kind of capital, while literary scholars have embraced Bourdieu’s work because of the tribute it pays to literature as the lynchpin of the “autonomous field,” where value and wealth are accrued almost despite themselves. In Part II, we stress that these divisions make less sense now than ever before. Most major publishers exist within enormous media conglomerates eager to see the literary endlessly repurposed. For them literature is not necessarily a shelf of thick books, although such an image has its uses. Instead the literary is a set of ideas about cultural value—associated with meaning, agency, inquiry, exploration, self-discovery, and interpretation, for example—that circulate well beyond the publishing industry, permeating film, television, radio, and digital media. The literary is increasingly 99