Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999

Evan Brier

Nis 2024 · University of Iowa Press

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Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

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Evan Brier is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is author of A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.