Mastering the Marketplace: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France by Anne O'Neil-Henry (review)

The concluding chapter of Mastering the Marketplace describes the current crisis in the global publishing industry, attributed to the growth of huge online booksellers, the Internet, and the digitizing of books and advertising. One impact of such developments is the clash between "high" literary works vs. "low" popular books. In 2007–08, Gallimard, which prides itself on producing elite literary works, published L'élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery, a coming-of-age work that was a phenomenal bestseller. O'Neil-Henry examines this novel closely to show how it occupies an ambiguous position in the literary world because it incorporates characteristics of popular literature and higher aesthetic literature, having both cultural and commercial capital. It is an example of how authors adapt their writing strategies in response to changing commercial demands. This conclusion wraps up the principal focus of O'Neil-Henry's book, in which she examines how early nineteenth-century French writers were forced to adapt to the new phenomenon of popular, commercial literature. As technological changes in the twenty-first century impact today's literature, major changes in print technology, marketing, and commercial interests impacted the content of nineteenth-century writings. O'Neil-Henry's study has a two-fold approach: an historical study of book production and reading culture, and close literary analyses of the works of three authors—popular writers Paul de Kock, Eugène Sue, and Honoré de Balzac. O'Neil-Henry critiques various misconceptions and understudied aspects of popular literature, rehabilitating its disdained authors, while exposing techniques and strategies Balzac adopted in order to achieve commercial success. In her chapter on "panoramic literature," a popular form of low-brow literature characterized by the "physiology" series, O'Neil-Henry presents the development of marketing techniques including interesting images and advertisements of the time. The following chapters focus on each author, beginning with de Kock. A prolific writer whose works were wildly popular, de Kock was held in contempt by his"high literature" contemporaries. This study shows that de Kock was innovative and successful in marketing and understanding public tastes. Contrary to previous scholarship on de Kock's work, O'Neil-Henry performs close readings of his novels and makes a convincing argument that he was not only successful but also respected by his contemporaries. Similarly, O'Neil-Henry gives new readings of the novels of Sue, highlighting the success of understudied novels he produced prior to Les mystères de Paris, the work that almost exclusively defines him today. As for Balzac, O'Neil-Henry again takes a fresh view of his writings, revealing how he adapted some of the techniques and strategies of popular authors, often contributing to the popular commercial genre of the physiologies, despite his attacks on this type of literature. Well-researched and often using archival material, this study is highly readable and engaging. Although Mastering the Marketplace appears to treat a narrow subject, the depth of O'Neil-Henry's analyses and her consideration of cultural capital vs. commercial capital gives the reader a new perspective on the literature of all levels produced at this time.