Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola

Description

A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author's attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author's struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky's sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola's Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola's own big business, his factory of novels. Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author's knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value. Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Notes on Citation Introduction: The Economics of Narrative The Role of Economic Criticism The Importance of the Publishing Context Literature as Transaction The Notion of Literary Value Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola 1. Balzac: Narrative as Business “Phrase-Mongers” (Marchands de phrases) La Torpille: Experiments in Narrative Value Esther: The Prospectus, Production Model Lucien: Deconstructing the Prospectus Vautrin: Vautrin or Vaut rien—Who Decides? 2. Dostoevsky: Who Buys the Story? Reform, Experiment, and the Novel How to Write a Novel? The Novel as Prospectus The Rejection of Prospectus Auction: The Return of Commercial Value Speculation 3. Zola: The Business of Narrative The Commercialisation of the Book The New Economics of Fiction Zola as Promoter of Story and Book From Promoter to Managing Director La Curée: The Narrative of Business L’Argent: The Business of Narrative Conclusion: Accounts Appendix A: Serialisation of The Brothers Karamazov Appendix B: The Thirty-Eight Retellings of the Murder of Fedor Karamazov Notes Acknowledgements Index