Can I read Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola on EtoBox?

Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola by Jonathan Paine is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola about?

A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels. Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first

Author

Jonathan Paine

Publisher

Harvard University, Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9780674243040