Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies

Book excerpt: Literature is not only about aesthetics, but also almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies focuses on the creation of symbolic capital for the literary legacies of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov that was eventually exchanged by cultural merchants for financial and ideological profit. Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White discuss the ways in which certain cultural merchants created symbolic meaning for these two authors through a process of collusion, consecration, and the marketing of tangible and intangible products that lead to some sort of transaction. The promotion and maintenance of posthumous legacies involves an intricate network of personal interests that drive the preservation of literary reputations.