The Politics and Production of Contemporary British Writing

Both Claire Squires’s Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain and Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies’s A Black British Canon? assess trends in recent British cultural production and make welcome contributions to a growing body of research that addresses the institutions and economics that shape contemporary literature and art.¹ Reading one against the other suggests distinctions between two kinds of work in this area. One is scholarship that emerges from a materialist tradition. Building upon the legacies of British cultural studies, this research reveals how cultural production, circulation, and valuation are impinged upon, facilitated by, productive of, or a challenge to social inequalities. The other is research that is empiricist or documentary. Its methodology aligns with the history of the book, and its goal is neutral description of a set of economic relations and, often, of reception of those relations by interpretive communities that are themselves constrained or constituted by market realities.

Like its precursors, current work in the materialist mode operates with specific political imperatives in mind. In the case of A Black British Canon?, a collection of essays, the goal is advancing antiracist politics and identifying some of the pernicious effects of the formation, commodification, and institutionalization of a set of works and artists categorized as “Black British.” In contrast, work in the empiricist vein tends to present multiple rubrics for reading a situation. In the case of Marketing Literature, whose author once worked for the publisher Hodder Headline, that situation is the increasing strength of marketers’ hands in shaping new writing. Squires presents this strength not as a catastrophe for the diversity of cultural expression, but as a phenomenon that has been read that way by parties with a vested interest in the book trades, for instance. These parties’ views are certainly valid, but they are not exclusively so.

In writing her book, Squires drew upon her own experiences, interviewed publishers, agents, and journalists, and consulted the book trade’s voluminous self-reflexive resources, including the trade press, bestseller lists, marketing materials like sales presenters (sent out from publishers to booksellers), and reports by industry analysts. In unsurpassed depth and with admirable clarity, Squires documents the major changes in the British industry since the 1970s, which include conglomeration and globalization, the demise of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) and with it publishers’ control over retail prices, and the triumph of the literary agent and the book prize. But her primary concern is the waning of editorial control over literary publishing and, especially, the concomitant “striking intensification” of marketing activity (2).

Squires understands marketing not as insidious commodification of pristine aesthetic objects, but as its own form of representation and interpretation, which readers knowingly receive and contest. She argues that it involves multiple and sometimes conflicting agents and is nothing less than the process of “making” contemporary writing—its value, and sometimes its content as well. She stresses that it is difficult to know when writers produce with market constraints and trends in view, and the examples she provides are rarely of this kind. Still, that Pat Barker ’s turn toward the “male” domain of war writing might have been prompted by a desire for more readers and prizes, or that Martin Amis decided to make a market spectacle of himself just as his agent sold The Information (1995), a novel about literary celebrity, adds weight to her claim that “material conditions and acts of marketing profoundly determine the production, reception and interpretation of literature” (16). They constitute the conditions not only for literature’s circulation, but also, at least sometimes, for its meaning.

For the most part, Squires accepts the industry’s own definition of the literary novel. It is a sales category like any other, one whose nature and value are shaped by industry phenomena. It is a contender for certain book prizes, appears in specific formats...