The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (review)

This well-researched and densely argued study represents an important contribution to our knowledge of the history of authorship and publishing in France. Focusing on the evolution of the writer's status and relationship with a growing print industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Turnovsky proposes a radically new analysis of this process. Rejecting the more simplistic view according to which writers of the period were increasingly able to wean themselves off patronage and live on income from their books, he persuasively argues that changes in the ways in which authors were perceived by the aristocrats who had hitherto supported them played an equally important role. According to one such view, the 'professional' or 'hack' writer was motivated by greed rather than by loftier ambitions and so was unworthy of their patronage. Turnovsky suggests, however, that such perceptions cannot be viewed in isolation, and he traces their changing nature in terms of a far greater complexity. Other crucial factors included ongoing debates over the definition of an homme de lettres, the very nature of intellectual legitimacy, central to which was the self-image of writers themselves as represented in their own rhetoric, and, not least, the new pressures brought to bear on authors and their readers by a market-driven print industry. Particularly influential was a functioning of the book trade as a polemical construct, according to which the value of a literary work was partly generated by the received idea of the struggling writer. Turnovsky here skilfully exploits Bourdieu's model of the 'champ littéraire' to analyse the emergence of the book market in terms of its conceptualization as a field of authorship, while departing from it in a number of salient respects. In this and other contexts he might profitably have drawn on Robert Darnton's invaluable study of 'livres philosophiques', a broad category of any writings considered subversive and including so-called obscene books such as the remarkably popular Thérèse philosophe. Such works had an undoubted place in the development of the book trade, as Darnton convincingly argues in his The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996), a study that Turnovsky, somewhat surprisingly, ignores. This omission notwithstanding, and perhaps in spite of its apparently narrow focus, The Literary Market will appeal to a wide range of scholars. Referencing Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, and many other figures of the French Enlightenment, as well as their nineteenth-century successors, Turnovsky's book will prove useful not only to literary historians, but to anyone with an interest in the complex relations between authors, readers, and a defining social context in France since the Renaissance.