Tea at Trianon: The Strange State of the Novel in the “Age of Amazon”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The Strange State of the Novel in the “Age of Amazon”

From The Nation:

As one of the most profitable companies in the world and as a bookseller, Amazon has amassed a surplus of visibility; less is known about its effects on literary production in terms of aesthetics and sociality. This is precisely what Mark McGurl, in his new book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, sets out to discover. “Amazon,” he writes, “is nothing if not a ‘literary’ company,” one that is “making an epic narrative out of the speedy satisfaction of popular want.” To survey the vast expanse of Amazon’s literary domain, McGurl makes frequent excursions into popular genres rarely considered among academics and critics—LitRPG, crowdsourced novels, the Alpha Billionaire Romance, contemporary zombie fiction, and adult-baby-diaper erotica—prompting a reassessment of the literary center and the literary fringe.

McGurl argues that without explicitly mentioning the company that controls their commercial destinies, many of these novels owe their characteristic structures and styles to the “sheer expressivity of Amazon’s corporate culture,” coupled with the vast expansion of America’s service industries in recent years. What it means to be a reader has changed too. The incessant prodding to consume more leaves the reader nursing a curious sense of emptiness and need. This is not unrelated to McGurl’s observation that “the sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it.” We discussed the faux-populism of corporate publishing platforms, “mommy porn,” and the cultural significance of novels in the Age of Amazon. (Read more.)