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On the Literary History of Selling Out: Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Ian Afflerbach
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Abstract

This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 230 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Maria Kuznetsova for a series of conversations about Iowa and contemporary fiction that helped inspire this essay.

References

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