Annotation:

Literature as a Social Institution is almost as old as independent humanities scholarship in Russia itself, and is also one of the first books to have been published by NLO press. For many years the authors of this book – sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin – strove to develop new approaches to reading that would allow us to grasp the institution of literature as a whole, as well as to explain how people form their own reading circles and how certain social processes relate to their choices. In their pathbreaking and still relevant research, these two scholars extended the study of the sociology of literature, introducing the discipline to Russia’s mid-1990s academic context. This book acquaints readers with the history of the concepts of “literature” and “the novel,” as well as the establishment of literary fiction as an institution within which classic, avant-garde, and mass literature mutually influenced and repelled one another. It also explores the common yet complex interdependencies between writers, publishers, booksellers, literary critics, educators, and readers, while analyzing the role of journals in the literary process and examining the influence that the form of a book has on its readership. This updated second edition of Literature as a Social Institution includes several supplementary and thematically related articles by both authors, as well as a foreword by Lev Gudkov that reflects on the significance of this project.