In their introduction to this volume, Anthony Enns and Bernhard Metz seek to show how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, and typography, reflect or even determine their cultural status. Recent experimental research seems to confirm this hypothesis by showing that book covers play an important role in the first evaluation of a text. As the history of the literary field shows, the prestige of books is the product of the tension between two competing capitals: symbolic and economic capital. Their relation is inversely proportional, as symbolic capital increases the more economic capital decreases, and vice versa. When books are heavily promoted and consequently popular, for example, they are often perceived as trivial, whereas rare and complex books are more often perceived as serious and therefore prestigious. If, as the editors of the present volume seem to propose, the prestige of books changes depending on variations in book production, then the digital era should have a huge impact on this value.

The rise of the internet is only one aspect of the digital revolution—a technological transformation that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the publishing industry. The transformation that has affected the publishing industry at every level of the value chain is reflected by the growth of online retailers like Amazon as well as the much-publicized debates about digital books among literary critics. As Adriaan van der Weel puts it, thanks to digitality we are experiencing the third reading revolution of humanity, which is changing the “Order of the Book” that formed the basis of Western culture. Van der Weel uses Walter Benjamin's concept of “aura” to describe the authority of the print book and the loss of the “aura” to describe the fate of the book in the digital age. This loss is precisely a loss of prestige, which is directly linked to the materiality of books. The digital text threatens the existence of the print book in several ways. First of all, digital copies of a text cannot be distinguished from the original. Secondly, in a digital world, a literary text always runs the risk of “digital obsolescence” (i.e., the deterioration of its materiality).

We have already seen—in chapter 2—the first truly contemporary theorization of the central role of images in a political economy: Marie-José Mondzian's account of Byzantine iconoclasm, outlined in an essay of 1989 and set out fully in her book Image, Icon, Economy; The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (1996). There, she exercised a characteristic restraint in hinting at but not coining the neologism “iconomy” as the general term for her subject. Writing during the first Gulf War, however, she does not refrain from asserting the current relevance of her project, not only in her subtitle but also in statements such as this: “From the specific standpoint of provoking belief or obtaining obedience, there is no great difference between submitting to a church council or to CNN.”

In 1992, Jean-Joseph Goux spoke of “a new ‘iconomy’” to highlight the extraordinary financial values attaching to works of art in the contemporary art market. In the same year, a more comprehensive contemporary theorization, entirely immersed in current problematics, was attempted. Arizona University graduate student Dion Dennis embarked on a project entitled The Subject Under the Sign of the Market: Steps Toward a Political Iconomy. In a 1993 essay, he defined it as follows:

In this chapter I look at the bodily feelings, kinds of phasic arousal, which are associated with strong experiences, and which constitute the ‘thrill’ response. This is part of a broader consideration of emotion and its relation to strong experiences.

Phasic Arousal

The poet A. E. Housman in his 1933 lecture ‘The name and nature of poetry’ argues that poetry should convey strong arousal rather than ideas: poetry stabs the heart, shakes the soul, takes the breath away and brings tears (Housman 1933: 23, 35, 46).

In these strong experiences, arousal is manifested as piloerection in which the hairs rise, and also manifested as tears, and as an enteric reaction in the stomach. Housman is not claiming that these experiences are responses to conventional emotional triggers: the hair does not stand up because the poem frightens him, for example, and he does not shed a tear at a poem which is sad. Instead, he implies that these arousal responses are part of an epistemic feeling that ‘something is a poem’.

With same-sex couples having gained marital recognition in a number of prominent jurisdictions around the globe, it might appear that the struggle for the legal recognition of nontraditional families is over. But that is not the case. There continue to be families not recognized by a multitude of legal systems, including nonconjugal unions of friends or relatives, polyamorous relationships of more than two persons, and various religious families (including polygamous ones). These families embody a queer resistance to normalcy in family life as they challenge through their lived experience “sexual regimes of normalization” (Cossman 2019, 25) and find themselves at odds with “the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin 1995, 62).

The misalignment between law and the reality of modern families continues with the effect that traditional (dyadic, heterosexual) marital families are prioritized when allocating benefits, rights, and obligations. This book explores counterintuitive ways of addressing this legal imbalance by staging an uncomfortable yet necessary conversation concerning a potentially conjoined queer–religious politics challenging “common-sense” (often majoritarian) norms and practices in family law. Such a politics requires looking beyond traditional allies, strategies, and discourses. We are especially intrigued by whether some religious groups might be allies in pluralizing family law in ways beneficial to queer politics. The intuition is that, when it comes to the legal regulation of intimate connections, certain religious subjectivities have more in common with those involved in queer politics than liberal politics.

A number of religious groups have shown an interest in promoting alternative family structures, which is a topos in queer activism as well. For example, with nondyadic unions, an oft-overlooked shared interest in overcoming the monogamous paradigm (commonly engrafted into state law) unites supporters of polyamory and polygamy. As a result, a common desire to overcome law's monogamous paradigm could unite queer polyamorists located in northern California, for example, with splinter “orthodox” Mormon communities living in Utah.

The potential for queer and religious groups to converge has occasionally been investigated before, especially in the U.S. context. For example, Andrew Koppelman's latest (2020) book on LGBT rights and religion has perceptively intervened into the ongoing debate over whether U.S.

Apart from The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), there are few works on book history that even mention the history of comic books. This is perhaps due to the fact that comic books are generally dismissed by critics as a para- or subliterary field that is far removed from the realm of mainstream publishing. As Jan Baetens points out, comic books are perceived as a form of mass media entertainment not only because of their lowbrow content but also because of their industrial mode of production: “The internal excesses of the genre […] and […] the external constraints of the comics industry, which imposed a crudely capitalistic, fully Taylorized production system, are both responsible for a lowbrow image that still prevails in many well-educated circles.” In the late twentieth century, comic books were also eclipsed by the rise of the “graphic novel”—a new publishing format that was often praised for transforming graphic narratives into a legitimate literary genre. Stephen Tabachnick argues, for example, that “the graphic novel has little in common with traditional comic books” because it is “much more like full-length prose novels.” The term “graphic novel” thus conveys a sense of cultural prestige that was often seen as lacking in comic books, and this newfound prestige was inextricably linked to its material form, as “graphic novels are as thick as regular prose books, and they are printed on better paper and with better ink than usual comic books.”

There are several problems with this distinction, however, as the graphic novel format has proven to be difficult to define. For example, Roger Sabin defines graphic novels as “lengthy comics in book form,” and Tabachnick describes this format as “an extended comic book”—definitions that appear to be based on length, although extended narratives are common in comic books, and many of them have the same number of pages. In contrast, Edward T. Sullivan emphasizes the brevity of graphic novels by noting that they often contain “a single story”—a definition that would also apply to comic books featuring self-contained narratives. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey similarly argue that graphic novels reject the logic of serialization, which “functions as a symptom of a craving for prestige that aimed at definitively cutting through the possible ties to comics,” yet this definition ignores the countless graphic novels that are published in character-based series.

“Mrs. Ruete, the Berlin-based sister of the Sultan of Zanzibar, will soon publish a two-volume work entitled ‘Memoirs of an Arabian Princess,’ which is said to contain both personal experiences and particularly impressive descriptions of Mohammedan [sic] culture in East Africa” states a notice in a German illustrated magazine of April 1886, an example of the publicity preceding the publication of Emily Ruete's autobiography Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess) that same year. The memoirs, written in German, primarily describe the childhood and young adulthood of their author, who was born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, near Zanzibar Town in 1844, and who lived in Zanzibar until the age of 22, when she left the island after her relationship with her German neighbor was discovered. It is widely acknowledged as the oldest published autobiography of an Arab woman in existence. The memoirs, extending from a personal life to “a meditation about the self” in history and culture, also describe episodes from Ruete's later life, such as her journey to Zanzibar in 1885, where she and the inheritance she hoped to claim were used as a bargaining instrument, playing a central role in German colonial ambitions in East Africa. As the notice in the illustrated magazine heralds, they additionally discuss important aspects of Muslim and East African culture for her German readership, such as “The Status of Women in the Orient,” “The Fasting Period,” and “Slavery.” “I don't want to write a scholarly book,” writes Ruete, “I just want to try to make it possible for the European reader to have a correct understanding of the more important views and customs of the Orient.”

Before the publication of Ruete's memoirs, the Ruete's relationship and subsequent perceived flight from Zanzibar had proven enticing fodder for asides in the narratives of explorers and for articles in the illustrated magazines of the day. These imaginative retellings of this episode in Ruete's life read like a “fairytale from the Thousand and One Nights made real” and have arguably provoked the distinctive sober language and style of the memoirs themselves, termed “ethnographic” by Annegret Nippa, editor of the contemporary modernized and somewhat abridged German version of the memoirs.

A Vain, Fruitless, and Self-Contradictory Effort

In this famous soliloquy from Act 3 Scene 1, Shakespeare's Hamlet clearly didn't think his existence amounted to anything worthwhile, bombarded as it was with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with heartache and a thousand natural shocks, with the whips and scorns of time, with the oppressor's wrong and the pangs of disprized love. Why should he continue with the grunt and sweat of his weary life?

We have seen this question raised many times before in this book, whether in the lamentations of the Man to his Ba, in the terminal boredom of David Foster Wallace, in the existential distress of Anna Karenina and Constantin Levin or in the spiritual weariness of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It is rarely found in libraries and archives—at least not in one piece. If it is, then it is usually in a special location or an archival storage box, provided there is enough space to store it. It is rarely preserved in research libraries, as it is usually removed from the book and discarded without—or in some cases with—an understanding of its cultural significance. Research libraries discard it because a book must be loaned and used as a single material unit; to use Foucault's terminology, it is a “parallelepiped.” Public libraries also tend to discard it, although they sometimes cut it up, paste the more or less important additional information that it contains onto the cover of the book, and then—if they can afford it—laminate the cover so that this additional information, such as a blurb, is preserved more or less permanently. Dutch book collector Albert Samuel Abraham Struik used surveys to determine that only two libraries had ever purchased a book because of it. I am talking here about the dust jacket.

In the case of the German translation of Stephen King's novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), published by Schneekluth in 2000, the popular saying “never judge a book by its cover” was carried too far and became ironic, as this edition forced readers who typically ignore covers and dust jackets to make a decision. It definitely put their taste and judgment to the test and thus differentiated itself enormously from more conventional book editions.

The same company had also published the first edition of the German translation of Stephen King's novel Carrie (1974) with a dust jacket, and the publication of the German translation of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon seemed to reflect a desire to continue this tradition.

In the June 3, 2020, edition of the Sydney newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, Warren Brown's cartoon entitled “Recession” was published on the main editorial page (Fig. 7.1). The trope is Welcome in the New Year, but this midyear message is bleak. The central figure is an unkempt man in pajamas, slippers, and dressing gown, representing readers confined to their homes by lockdown orders required to combat the pandemic, or, like many others, recently thrown into unemployment by its effects. He opens his door, not to a new-born baby in a ribboned bassinette, but to a Scrooge-like figure, dressed as an undertaker, who carries a wreath with the insignia “Recession.” Resigned to his fate, the man admits the deathly messenger to his bleak house, which symbolizes not only the actual home of the average Australian but also the national economy. Both are already ravaged by several forces, each of them out of control. They come from a distance, but are intensely present, obliterating all signs of domesticity. In the background, the fires that raged across millions of acres of bush land throughout the early months of the year, despite the best efforts of the (mostly volunteer) Rural Fire Services. The spiky blobs of the coronavirus float everywhere. Meanwhile, a masked housewife spills her hoarded reams of toilet paper, the US President Donald J. Trump holds up a Bible, and a police officer beats a looter. “Come on in,” the man says despairingly, “It wouldn't be 2020 without you […]”

Some of these elements reflect the ideological orientation of the newspaper: The central figure is white, male, working-class, oppressed, and resentful; a looter rather than a black man or a protestor is shown battling the police officer. Others are specific to Australia: the raging bushfires, although much of California was in flames by June, so global warming in general is also evoked. Everything depicted is instantly recognizable as a visual signifier of the forces that were most powerfully shaping 2020 in many places throughout the world and in the imaginaries of many of its peoples.

The gathering of thousands of Trump supporters in the Capitol grounds at midday on January 6, 2021, transposed the image world of one of his rallies on to the main site of national governance. In the event, this was literally so, as the insurrectionary crowd was first formed and then fed by people who had assembled shortly before at the Ellipse, a stage on the Mall side of the White House, for a “Save America” rally. Trump's speech there was the final incitement to march on the Capitol to stop the certification of the Biden– Harris victory and, instead, secure his re-election. Just in case the message was not clear, to the right of the podium from which Trump spoke, a gateway was erected with these words emboldened across its canopy: MARCH ON THE CAPITOL. Thousands did what they were told. Breeching the outer perimeters of the Capitol grounds by 1 p.m., the crowd found itself occupying the structures erected for the impending inauguration of Joe Biden. The Trumpian image world merged with the postcard site of US patriotism. The reinauguration of Donald J. Trump was prefigured. Supporters then swarmed the Capitol building (Fig. 12.1).

Inside, unaware of the tumult, the legislators began their certification process. Around 2:15 p.m., members of the Proud Boys militia led the break in through windows and the front door (Fig. 12.2). A few minutes later, the mob found itself in the Great Rotunda of the Capitol (Fig. 12.3). They had followed the unfamiliar passageways, brushing aside outnumbered and under-prepared officers. At times, they filed through crowd-control chords, as if they were on a guided tour. Then, they filled the huge hall with excited shouts, milled around in waves, taking selfies, posting to their friends and followers, waving their TRUMP flags and red MAGA gear, showing that they had arrived at the heartland. Some carried the metal bars they had used to beat back the police trying to keep them out of the building. Others covered their faces, half-aware that it might be smart to disguise their identity. Cellphone videos show that soon the hubbub died down, voices were stilled, and the majority of those present stood in silent awe.

The following chapter focuses on the emergence of deluxe book publishers in Brazil, where the book industry is clearly more vulnerable to the fluctuations and crises of the global book market than it is in other regions of the world. This vulnerability will be explained primarily through the lenses of historical, economic, and social inequality, which present fundamental problems for the book industry. They lead, for example, to higher book prices, higher printing and paper costs, and unfavorable delivery networks. These are limitations that affect not only authors but also publishers as well as the book market in general. These contrasts can be most clearly observed in the early twenty-first century, when a phase of stability and growth in the book trade was disrupted by economic downturns. Prior to that, a new publishing phenomenon had emerged in Brazil: for the first time, prestige was associated with the consumption of books.

My considerations are based on two historical facts that cannot be ignored. First, since the early twenty-first century there has been a new organizational form in the Brazilian publishing industry, which was previously unknown. The international tendency to transform publishing houses into media companies and government policies to democratize access to education have greatly contributed to this shift. These policies have been undertaken since the end of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), but the first signs of success only came with the economic upswing and the investments in book production and distribution that took place under the governments of President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (2002–2010) and President Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). Although Brazil plays a role in the global economic system, its role in the academic and cultural production of immaterial goods, like books, remains marginal. Today, after a process of deindustrialization from the 1990s onward, Brazil has become a supplier of raw materials for the international market, and many of the books published in Brazil are printed in China.

The colonial past and the former opposition between the proprietors of enslaved workers and the enslaved themselves created a brutal concentration of wealth that is still evident today. This is illustrated by studies on income tax data, which have recently been published for the first time.

In this chapter, I show that the ordinary characteristics of literary texts have the capacity to set in motion the various triggers for strong experience. These same characteristics which peak in strong experiences also give literary texts their continuous epistemic characteristics and produce feelings of mild arousal.

Literature and Strong Experiences

Literature is relevant for the study of strong experiences for two reasons. First, people can have strong experiences triggered by literary texts. Emily Dickinson defined poetry by its ability to cause a thrill:

Second, literary texts can represent characters as having strong experiences. Here for example is a fictionalized account by Kate Chopin of a character responding to music with thrills:

Sometimes an author will describe a character's experience, and this may also be a kind of indirect report if the character's experience is based on a real experience known to the author. Because all reports of strong experience are unverifiable, the distinction between real and fictional reports is not as important as it might be.

In addition to being ‘built’ to pursue active public lives, Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage instigated a range of industrial strategies to help them infiltrate domains forbidden to them. They needed to battle the tropes that insisted women had little aptitude for political and economic discourse, had no ability to understand technical methods, and were incapable of wielding authority. They initially strengthened their status by enacting local diplomacies and industry mentorships; they sought out ABC gatekeepers, men who appreciated that women could contribute to the national debate. The cohort also found ways to unleash their technical prowess, surprising male co-workers with their innovative programming. They filled the gaps created in moments of transition; positions which, if they were lucky, were overlooked long enough for them to establish key skills and assert ownership over their productions. They also took risks as technologies evolved, tackling experimental production methods while their male peers were less willing to sacrifice their safe, established positions. Not all, however, were so successful with these strategies. Joyce Belfrage was caught up in a chaotic industrial process that hindered her ability to do the job; her authority was destabilised and male producers advanced at the expense of her own professional well-being.

ABC Mentors and Gatekeepers

One factor that was essential to the success of female producers in the postwar years was their ability to forge productive working relationships with senior ABC decision-makers. The ABC's rejection of Irene Greenwood demonstrated the need for trust between producers and management; ambitious women would otherwise find themselves isolated and unable to advance into key producing roles. Kay, Catherine and Therése received advice and importantly, support, from high-ranking male mentors. Having an advisor to provide insight was useful, but it was more beneficial to have an advocate, a senior ABC officer who encouraged producers to show initiative and put them forward for new projects.

Through the late 1940s, Therése Denny had been increasingly discouraged by the constant cycle of rejections to her applications for producing roles at the ABC. She had worked casually for both the public broadcaster and commercial stations, and longed to work as a producer, but at best had only managed to get freelance work contributing to dramatized radio talks.

The video of George Floyd's murder entered an image-driven economy, one that is much larger and more complex than the image blizzard carried on Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, and similar platforms. While it was posted to YouTube, it quickly went viral on the other platforms and then was amplified by heritage media such as television and newspapers, in the United States and then quickly around the world. It soon proved to be the most impactful recent posting in a growing stream of such visual records, the grim inheritance of centuries of law enforcement exercised through excessive brutality. In the United States, the precedent that comes most readily to mind is the video of the beating of Rodney King by several officers from the Los Angeles police department in 1991 (Fig. 10.1). There are extraordinary parallels but also several significant differences between the two videos, the events they register, and the conditions of their reception. What might a comparison tell us about how the iconomy works, nearly 30 years later, in a society—indeed, a world—engaged in all-out image wars and mired in seas of misinformation and disinformation?

In the immediate and near aftermath of its making, the video of the beating of Rodney King had different valences in three related but, at the time, quite distinct contexts: on local and national media, above all on broadcast television, both free-to-air and cable; in the legal system, specifically a court in Simi Valley, in Ventura County, outside Los Angeles; and in an art museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, during its Biennial of 1993. Today, by contrast, the George Floyd murder video counts in a media environment in which television is divided between several formats from free-to-air through cable to mobile phones and is just one among several other platforms, with multiple crossovers between them. Personal social media platforms predominate. Any image, any video clip, and every kind of information can be conveyed through them, with few constraints, although calls to impose some limits are growing louder as cultural and political divides widen in most societies.