Afterword

Abstract

If you have just finished your monthly catch-up with the New York Review of Books, noted who won the Booker prize this year, ordered a book nominated for the Booker prize, or just concluded one of those enervating and uncollegial curriculum debates about what should or should not be on the “basic and required reading list,” you will recognize the processes examined in the two closing chapters in this volume. They address the socio-political elements that often dominate how critics, readers, and other cultural authorities “receive” and evaluate literary and artistic products. Particularly since the mass production of print media from the late eighteenth century up to today, and in its wake “the age of mechanical reproduction”¹ that detached artworks from tradition and context, receptions of literary and other cultural works cannot be divorced from the sometimes near-censorial role of school and university curricula directors, publishers, museum curators and directors, book and media critics, literary prize committees, censorship committees, literary magazine editors, translators, markets, and other critical measurers of value in the literary and cultural fields.