In the 1980s and 90s, the publishing industry in the United States was transformed by a series of mergers and acquisitions, as long-standing houses were subsumed into international multimedia conglomerates to form what we now know as The Big Five—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster. Though conglomeration revolutionized the processes of literary production, scholars have paid little mind to these corporate practices. This dissertation investigates the ways that literature is made today by focusing on the overlooked professionals shaping the field of contemporary literary production: Agents, Editors, Authors, and Distributors. Too often dismissed as mere bureaucratic functionaries, these middlemen are in fact powerful nodes between artist and corporation, and they force us to rethink the category of literary production as a form of corporate creativity. Exploring the influence of middlemen on contemporary literary forms, I blend computational methods, ethnography, literary history, and close reading to model a new method for analyzing the field of literary production. I reveal how these professionals operate as administrators of literary prestige and “corporate taste” today, shaping the form and content of contemporary fiction while providing access to mainstream publication and cultural consecration. I argue that contemporary fiction allegorizes the logic of the marketplace, even while critiquing the neoliberal corporatization of literary production.
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