Overview

This topical, lively and wide-ranging book examines the material conditions under which the contemporary English novel is produced and consumed. Its starting point is the general economic emergency which showed up these conditions with unusual clarity in the early 1970s. The first section of the book, 'Crisis and Change', considers the changing patterns of institutional book-purchase, inflation and novel-production, the 'Americanisation' of the British book trade, and the present state of fiction reviewing. The second section, 'State Remedies', surveys such interventions, and failed interventions, as Public Lending Right, Arts Council patronage, and university support for creative writers. The third section, 'Trends, Mainly American', selects specific areas (paperback publishing, self-publishing, book-clubs, television work) which offer pointers to significant future developments in British literary culture. Fiction and the Fiction Industry pays close attention to actual novels, combining literary criticism with its examination of the book trade.

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9781472513151

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Dr. Sutherland is Reader in English at University College London. He previously lectured at Edinburgh University and has held visiting academic posts in the United States. As well as contributing to many academic journals he has reviewed fiction and literary studies for the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman and published articles on the booktrade in The New Review and New Society. His previous books are Thackeray at Work (1974) and Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976) and he has edited novels boy Trollope and Thackeray for the Penguin English Library.

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