Publication details
Commercial, or popular literature?: the case of small publishers’ fairs in Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In this presentation, I focus on book publishers’ strategies employed in relation to their participation on small book fairs, flourishing recently in Czech Republic. May it be due to inner changes of publishing field’s logics or due to various external factors, for instance renewed sense of neighbourhood community put forward by hipster subculture, these fairs contribute to minor, yet interesting shift of common notion of literature and its social uses. Whereas maintaining books’ status as a mark of cultural distinction, small publishers’ fairs seem to redefine it. They reemphasize tight connection between books as beautiful material objects and herein locked literary texts as stimuli for readers’ imagination and reflection. Furthermore, they take books out of readers’ homes and bookcases – sanctuaries on their own - and push them back into everyday course of life in its profanity and collectivity. Reviewing publishers’ opinions and strategies towards small book fairs, some share this joyful notion of book culture and interpret it as a nice extension of literature’s traditional autonomy vis-a-vis other cultural products. Yet others are more suspicious, perceiving this same change as an unmistakable sign of cultural industries logics, which could be threatening rather than cheerful. I document and illustrate both of these positions, drawing on data from semistructured interviews with publishing professionals, promotional materials of small publishers’ fairs or their representation in media. |