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This article addresses the connections between material strategies and knowledge construction in contemporary literature. Through two case studies, Anne Carson's Nox (2010) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001), this article argues that by capitalising on the material, often visual component of literature, Carson heightens an embodied reading process that encourages affective forms of knowledge. To this end, my reading builds on theories of visual textuality by Anne-Marie Christin and Johanna Drucker in conversation with insights from cognitive theory. Through an emphasis on visual patterns, the analysis demonstrates how the knowledge worlds evoked in these long poems, understood as referring to the epistemological premises and possibilities afforded by the literary work, are shaped by the visual screen of the page and of the literary work as a whole. As physical and imaginative spaces, Nox and The Beauty of the Husband thus stage intricate relationships between matter and knowledge, which are foregrounded in poetic and multimodal works but are present in all literary works to a certain extent. The implication is that readers can only know as much about a literary work as they can see and feel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the autobiographies of Spanish-language publishers, Carlos Barral’s project undoubtedly stands out, consisting of three volumes plus an autofiction, which he published between 1975 and 1988, precisely when his power as a publisher had expired. The set of these four texts is not only essential for understanding the socio-literary strategies of an entire period of Spanish, European and Latin American literature. In addition, it builds a complex and exceptional image of the publisher over time, in which can be detected the decision-making process, the importance of symbolic and economic capital, and the effect of the different literary and political struggles. In short, the repertoire of successes and failures, of alliances and enmities, of criticisms and self-criticisms that distinguish the position of the editor from that of other literary activity agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in an extraordinary time in human history. Arguably, the most significant social changes have taken place in recent decades, including changes in policy and attitudes towards human rights, how we educate and treat children, towards sexual violence and abuse, sexuality and gender identification, to name just a few. In Australia, we have witnessed public responses through Royal Commissions and other public inquiries that have given voice to generations of people whose suffering had been silenced by formal and informal social mechanisms. Now, in the twenty-first century, the proliferation of new technologies, social media and social campaigns designed to engage people online as well as offline have empowered citizens to take control of their narratives, to tell their own stories. In the published literature, a great many have begun to reveal the nature and extent of traumas experienced by individuals, families, groups and entire communities. In the publishing industry, scant attention is given to the occupational risks faced by the workforce charged with disseminating these trauma stories: the editors, literary agents, proofreaders, publicists and other publishing personnel who are repeatedly exposed to trauma narratives. Even as publishing facilitates healing through story, it is also perpetuating—or at the very least enabling—the transmission of trauma: from author to publishing personnel, and quite possibly also from industry to reader. This paper posits that publishing as an industry is awash with trauma. Through the perspective of an industry insider, it explores the three faces of trauma in the publishing context: recounting trauma as a vehicle for healing and reconciliation, the trauma narrative as a commodity and vicarious trauma as an occupational hazard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Constellation Cendrars is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on Valery Larbaud's role as a promoter and translator of Ramón Gómez de la Serna's work, particularly his reflections on translation theory. Topics include Larbaud's influence as a literary agent, his contributions to the adaptation of Gómez de la Serna's Greguerías into Criailleries, and the broader implications of his translation practices on literary appreciation in France.

Scholars of cultural globalisation overwhelmingly agree that cultural exchanges, albeit asymmetrical and sometimes contested, have increased during the last four decades. Literature is by no means the exception and with the increase in translations, there has been a growing interest on behalf of scholars and policy makers in understanding the mechanisms and the actors behind literary circulation. This study builds on some of the previous research about translators’ habitus, routines and job satisfaction and expands on the existing literature by presenting empirical data on the common dispositions, routines, ethos and problems shared by European literary translators. This analysis draws from the social movements’ literature, particularly from the concept of ‘radical habitus’ to theoretically frame the findings. The study presents the shared characteristics and also explores how the structural positions of source and target language, market sizes, and cultural policies also shape the conditions under which translators work. Based on 69 semi-structured interviews with European writers, translators, publishers, literary agents and consultants, this paper sheds light on the figure of the literary translator: their status in the field, their struggles, strategies and mechanisms for accumulating capital. The analysis suggests that the fi gure of the translator is regarded as a highly educated individual whose high cultural capital is not matched by their (relatively low) financial capital. The activity of translators was often located at an intersection between artistic creation, literary expertise and cultural mediation and it was defined as a challenging and important job but also one which faces threats from the market and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most critical studies on John Fante tend to insist exclusively on his Italianness putting into evidence his biographical experiences and Italian roots at the expense of the complex literary inheritance underlying his vocation. Through a reading of Ask the Dust, the present paper intends to propose a portrayal of the author as an authentically American voice who was fully aware of the great novelistic tradition that shaped his literary sensibility. At the same time, Fante's discovery of the novels of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, through the suggestion of the independent literary agent Elizabeth Nowell, shows how his development was based on a variety of influences that went beyond Italian literature and culture. Thus, Fante's indisputable originality lies precisely in his wide-raging vision and capacity to embrace diverse languages and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Rukhsana Yasmin describes her experiences as a literary agent from a Muslim cultural background. She recalls how, early in her career, she was somewhat limitingly regarded as a representative of "diversity" within the industry, but also notes the advantages of her insider's ability to recognize potential areas of sensitivity and broker conversations between authors and publishers to ensure the writer's experience is respected in the editing process and that unconscious biases resulting from a predominantly white, middle-class majority viewpoint are minimized. Although she still receives comparatively few novels addressing faith, Rukhsana is heartened by the success of recent essay anthologies by Muslim women. Along with the determination of younger writers to resist being pigeonholed by producing tonally and thematically varied work that better reflects their experiences, such publications push back against the trend for Muslim trauma narratives that have been a staple feature of minority publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intention of the present work is to demonstrate how an author can rescale himself in the local space thanks to literary agents (publishing houses, festivals, translations etc.), which have the role of emphasizing the value of his work that is willing to (re)win a literary bet precisely in the source culture, relying on a case study around the prose of Tatiana Țibuleac. The novelist gains symbolic capital abroad, on the one hand, because she gravitates between two peripheral spaces, Romania, respectively the Republic of Moldova, the second being subordinated to the first which has become a launching pad to the West, and, on the other hand, through the lens of its actual naturalization in France. What popularizes Tatiana Țîbuleac is not the reception of her novels in Romania, but the post-translation success justified by the attention later paid to the author by the Romanian press, considering the large volume of interviews mapped, most likely, in the wake of her journalistic career. The predilection for a writing of memory doubled by a hypersensitive dimension of an atrophied self or by the toxic frameworks of the relationship with a dysfunctional family – emergencies resolved only under the sign of the pathological, the case of the first novel. At the same time, the ideological panorama of a marginal culture, such as the Republic of Moldova, constrained between Soviet inflections, never completely purified, and the definition of an identity (not only national), as in the Glass Garden, but all of these are also possible causes of Tatiana Tîbuleac's enrollment among international writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating the contributions of the sociology of intellectuals developed by the Bourdieusian school, which analyses the activity in the field of multiple intermediaries (literary agents, translators, editors, political representatives, and academics), this article offers an overview of some of the strategies of importation and critical appropriation of Althusserian thought in English-speaking territories. The analysis begins in the 1960s, when it began to be introduced there through translations and critical commentaries, partly motivated by the international political situation, to the 1990s or so, when its importing agents had to face the delegitimization of Marxism and notably a certain public discrediting of the figure of the French philosopher. Special attention is paid to the movements occurring in the subfield of literary studies, something on which there are no systematic documents to date and which must continue to be addressed in the future. To this end, we take into consideration both the trajectory of certain agents and the theoretical proposals of some of the key texts that were formally or informally inscribed in that tradition, and which strove to configure original approaches to new objects based on the Althusserian corpus; thus combining the external analysis of intellectual history with the internal analysis of the objects of theoretical inquiry. All this sheds light, on the one hand, on the enormous capacity of that generation of importing agents to execute conceptual translations from the philosophical field (where Louis Althusser was originally inserted) to the literary field (where they operated). On the other hand, it provides information on the constitutive hierarchy of the international intellectual field, as the reactions in Great Britain and the United States, despite the linguistic affinity, are notably different and reinforce the idea of the autonomy of the fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records help trace the careers of William and Jenny Bradley, two intermediaries in the cultural exchanges between France and the United States in the twentieth century. The archive offers privileged access to an array of transatlantic negotiations in the interwar period and post-Second World War era. This article first aims at including the two agents into the communications circuit relevant to book history that unfolds from writer to editor and on to reader, at a time when the book industry became more international. The article then unveils the sociability rooted in the agents’ participation in the world of Parisian salons and in the building of literary and intellectual relationships in the transnational space of Paris. Ultimately, the article argues that the Bradleys’ lifework articulates cultures in ways that defy the simplified vision of a unidirectional flux in what has been suggested to be an “American Century” of influence and cultural domination. In sum, an interest in intermediation and a transnational approach bring together considerations over the professional contributions of the French-American literary agents and observations about little-known makers of cultural processes. This article draws from the manuscript of Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain : William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (Cossu-Beaumont, 2023) and hopefully serves to shed light on the journeys of William and Jenny Bradley as Atlantic passeurs.

The article addresses and corrects a long-standing error or misconception related to Brian O'Nolan's correspondence with his literary agents at A.M. Heath & Co Ltd. It aims to shed light on the gender and identity of the individuals involved in the literary agency, particularly focusing on Audrey Heath, one of the directors of A.M. Heath. It examines various historical documents and aims to provide a more accurate understanding of the situation and correct the misconceptions surrounding it.

This article seeks to examine the double agent from a literary perspective, focusing on how two spy novels set during the Cold War era—Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) by John le Carré and The Untouchable (1997) by John Banville—associate the double agent with the world of art. In spy novels set during the Cold War era, using the art world as a setting can provide a divided sense of self and the double agent's struggle toward inner completeness. Ultimately, this struggle ends in failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While John Lydgate's aureate style is commonly recognized as one of the significant features of his poetics, its reception among medieval audiences has not been closely assessed. This article is a case study that explores early readerly responses to Lydgate's aureate and paraliturgical lyrics collected in a late-fifteenth-century short anthology, Booklet IX of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21. Produced for a wealthy London merchant, this booklet reflects, at least partially, its first owner's literary interests, and its mise-en-page presents the aureate and paraliturgical lyrics as material objects. Such material presentations embed the texts in the sociocultural milieu of late-fifteenth-century London and presumably helped the first owner of the booklet to establish his social profile by performatively intertwining his devotional and literary agency with the sophistication of the poems contained in the volume [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay is based on a paper given at the "Symposium of African Literature in Global Perspectives" at the University of Kansas, sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities. It reflects thoughts on the predicaments of an emigrant African writer in his attempts to gain wider exposure on the global stage. In the process, the essay questions the validity of equal and reciprocal cultural and economic benefits that globalization is supposed to provide for African authors and participating theatre directors, producers, literary agents, and audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of literary agents in translation is intriguing yet under-researched. The mechanism of literary agenting vis-à-vis the initiation and promotion of translated literature is unexplored. This essay attempts to fill the gap by analyzing how Anna Holmwood, the principal translator and co-literary agent of Legends of the Condor Heroes, has initiated and promoted the translation. It first lays out how Holmwood's professional habitus as a literary agent was prototyped and developed. Drawing on firsthand materials such as email exchanges, speech transcriptions, interview records, and agent reports, it then examines how Holmwood's professional habitus empowered her to act as the initiator (selecting the book to be translated, signing the agenting contract, pitching, recommending co-translators, and titling the volumes) and sales promoter (coining the tagline 'A Chinese Lord of the Rings' and promoting the book on BBC) of the translation project, and recounts the process by which this translation came into being. This essay endeavors to refresh our understanding of literary agenting of translation and to foster the conjunction of translation studies and publishing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the literature about Revista Moderna (1898-1903) and Revista Moderna de México (1903-1911) assumes that both publications integrate a single editorial project because of its affiliation with the Latin American modernism, particularly with that of the second generation, which presented a more decadent aspect. Although some scholars have noted the differences between the two formats, the petit revue and the North American styled magazine, the truth is that Revista Moderna de México has been reviewed in very similar terms to its predecessor, that is, as a literary, elitist and minority magazine, representative of a group with a specific literary positioning. In this paper, I will examine some of the devices that the editors of Revista Moderna de México used to articulate this transformation not only of format, but also of discursive positioning, mediated by the political and publishing market conditions from that time. This study pretends to draw attention to the set of negotiations and resistance that some agents of the literary field carried out through their professionalization process and their search for an alleged autonomy regarding other recognition figures during the transition from the 19th century to the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]