Abstract
Jeremy Rosen analyzes the Hogarth Shakespeare series, launched in 2015 by Penguin Random House. He shows how today’s large-scale publishers have spurred similar ventures of rewritings, novelizations, and spinoffs of literary classics. Like Penguin Random’s revival of the celebrated Hogarth imprint, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, these publisher-driven intertextual series seek to capitalize on the prestige of illustrious literary brand names, and fuse them with the celebrity of superstar “house” authors, who the publishers commission to execute house-generated works. This trading on prestigious brand names emerges as one of the principal strategies publishers of literary fiction have adopted to find reliable marketplace success, in the era of conglomeration. But Rosen also shows how such strategies sit uneasily with the literary writers commissioned to execute such projects. Rosen detects, within such novels, writers’ continued adherence to a modernist ideal of autonomous production, even as they find themselves writing books contracted by corporate publishers. A tension at the heart of the contemporary literary novel emerges: a vestigial belief in the distinctiveness of the literary and the autonomy of art, vying against an awareness that the novel is ever more deeply embedded in global capital flows.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time of the writing of this essay, the series consists of: The Gap of Time (2015), Jeanette Winterson’s version of The Winter’s Tale; Shylock Is My Name (2016), Howard Jacobson’s reimagining of The Merchant of Venice; Vinegar Girl (2016), Anne Tyler’s transposition of Taming of the Shrew into a Washington, DC suburb; Hag-Seed (2016), Margaret Atwood’s scrambling of The Tempest; and New Boy (2017), Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, set in the sixth grade of a DC elementary school. Hogarth promises further output from additional writers it has contracted, including a Hamlet by Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, a Macbeth by Norwegian crime novelist and international publishing superstar Jo Nesbo, and a King Lear by Edward St. Aubyn.
- 2.
For influential accounts of the novel’s uneasy straddling of art and commerce, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James and The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, where he seeks to complicate Pascale Casanova’s account of “a globalized literary space increasingly dominated by multinational media corporations who sell ‘products based on tested aesthetic formulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership,’” by adducing James English’s insights into literary prize culture, which “suggest[] the widespread persistence of an ideal of disinterested aesthetic value even now, in our hyper-capitalist age” (McGurl 2009: 328).
- 3.
For the lasting recognition of illustrious publishers’ names, even as they have become imprints of conglomerates, see Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, especially 91.
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Rosen, J. (2020). Shakespeare Novelized: Hogarth, Symbolic Capital, and the Literary Market. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_16
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