Public Gains and Literary Goods

Abstract

Atop the pyramid of nineteenth-century literary achievement are rarities such as Joseph Conrad; at some (considerable) distance below, is Rudyard Kipling, whose texts, despite their significant critical presence in the first third of the twentieth century, were later found to be brimming with the colonialism that Conrad found problematic and criticism found unacceptable. However, prior to this historiographic assessment, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both Kipling and Conrad operated within a market that was more or less undifferentiated because it was saturated by colonialism. At one point they were evenly matched, since qualities other than colonial criticism were the primary goods offered by their publishers in the task of capturing market share. Readers eagerly read Conrad and Kipling alongside a host of other works, many by authors now forgotten but who were once household names. The qualities that those writers of the early twentieth-century popular market shared differed from the qualities valorized by later literary historiography.