Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture [1st ed.] 9783030491413, 9783030491420

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 1-9
Power and Prestige in the Australian Literary Field (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 11-39
The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 41-87
Celebration, Performance and Authority: Gender and Literary Festivals (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 89-122
Hierarchies of Legitimacy: Gender and Literary Prizes (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 123-176
Intersecting and Interacting Agents of Consecration: Gender and the Australian Publishing Field (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 177-211
Conclusion (Alexandra Dane)....Pages 213-219
Back Matter ....Pages 221-239

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY

Gender and Prestige in Literature Contemporary Australian Book Culture Alexandra Dane

New Directions in Book History

Series Editors Shafquat Towheed Faculty of Arts Open University Milton Keynes, UK Jonathan Rose Department of History Drew University Madison, NJ, USA

As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors. Editorial Board Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14749

Alexandra Dane

Gender and Prestige in Literature Contemporary Australian Book Culture

Alexandra Dane University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

New Directions in Book History ISBN 978-3-030-49141-3 ISBN 978-3-030-49142-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Wavebreakmedia Ltd UC_D/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book began its life as my doctoral thesis, a piece of work that found its way into the world with the help of Jock Given’s and Rowen Wilken’s generous guidance. Since this time, Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture has evolved into the work you see here, something that could not have been achieved without the incalculable support from the contemporary publishing studies community. Claire Squire’s, David Carter’s and Per Henningsgaard’s feedback on this work is instrumental to its existence. It is a privilege to have their astute and expert assessments on the early drafts of this book. Sybil Nolan’s and Beth Driscoll’s influence on my work continues beyond what I ever could have wished for and this book has benefited greatly from Sybil’s editor’s eye and Beth’s unbridled enthusiasm. I have the privilege of working with the most dynamic, exciting and innovative researchers. Millicent Weber, Stevie Marsden and Christina Neuwirth challenge and delight me on a daily basis, it is my very good fortune to work alongside them. Conversations with Eloise Faichney, Claire Parnell, LJ Maher, Jodi McAlister and Kenna MacTavish—the sharpest minds in the business—generate the most intelligent analysis of the contemporary publishing industry. This analysis radiates beyond G-01, throughout this book, and beyond.

v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Finally, the support of Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave Macmillan, and Shafquat Towheed and the New Directions in Book History editorial board has been a constant and quietly inspiring presence in the journey towards publication.

Contents

1

Introduction ‘To Be Australian, a Woman and a Writer’ Marginalised Genders and the Australian Literary Field References

1 2 5 8

2

Power and Prestige in the Australian Literary Field Approaching the Study of Prestige Conceptualising Literary Prestige References

11 14 30 35

3

The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews Contemporary Book Reviewing Practice Notes on Method Gender, Book Reviews & Literary Prestige Conclusion References

41 43 50 51 83 84

Celebration, Performance and Authority: Gender and Literary Festivals Adelaide Writers Week Melbourne Writers Festival Notes on Method

89 95 95 96

4

vii

viii

5

6

7

CONTENTS

Gender and the Literary Festival Conclusions References

96 119 122

Hierarchies of Legitimacy: Gender and Literary Prizes Gender and Literary Prizes A Study of Gender and Australian Literary Prizes Notes on Method Prize-Winning Authors Shortlisted Authors Prize Judges The Relationship Between Literary Prizes and Sales Performance Conclusions References

123 132 139 142 144 158 162

Intersecting and Interacting Agents of Consecration: Gender and the Australian Publishing Field A Model for Understanding the Movement of Symbolic Capital Around the Australian Literary Field How the Agents of Consecration Intersect Across the Literary Field Assessing the Influence of Each Agent of Consecration The Influence of Symbolic Capital Beyond the Field of Cultural Production The Relationship Between Gender and Accumulated Symbolic Capital A Closer Look: 10 Symbolically Wealthy Authors Transforming Structures of Power Bringing About Meaningful Change References Conclusion References

168 169 173

177 179 183 188 193 196 199 203 207 210 213 218

References

221

Index

233

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10

Breakdown of Australian titles published, 1965–2015 (Source AustLit 2017a) Number of book reviews per year: ABR, The Age, The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women authors reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women reviewers in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women reviewers and authors in US and UK publications, 2010–2015 (Source VIDA Women in the Literary Arts 2019) Proportion of male versus women-authored fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women reviewers of fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women-authored non-fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Proportion of male versus women reviewers of non-fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015 Most reviewed authors per decade in ABR, The Age, The Australian Gender breakdown of authors reviewed by men and authors reviewed by women in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

13 54 56 57

58 60 61 63 64 71

73

ix

x

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.11

Fig. 3.12 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9

Gender breakdown of authors reviewed by men and authors reviewed by women in ABR, The Age and The Australian, per decade Proportion of women authors reviewed versus proportion of bestselling women authors, 2003–2015 Representation of women authors/speakers in the Adelaide Writers Week and Melbourne Writers Festival programs Gender breakdown of keynote speakers at Adelaide Writers Week, per decade Gender breakdown of keynote speakers at Melbourne Writers Week, per decade Proportion of women featured authors at in conversation events versus the proportion of women moderators at in conversation events at Melbourne Writers Festival Gender breakdown of mixed-gender panels at Adelaide Writers’ Week, per decade Gender breakdown of mixed-gender panels at Melbourne Writers Festival, per decade Gender breakdown of panel discussions at Adelaide Writers’ Week, per decade Gender breakdown of panel discussions at Melbourne Writers Festival, per decade Gender breakdown of winning authors, Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1965–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 1979–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, 1985–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, 1979–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 1985–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, 1980–2015 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, 1985–2015 Gender breakdown of Miles Franklin Literary Award winners, per decade Gender breakdown of Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction winners, per decade

74 79

98 100 101

106 110 111 113 114 144 145 145 146 146 147 147 150 151

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14 Fig. 5.15 Fig. 5.16

Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry winners, per decade Gender breakdown of authors of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction shortlisted titles, 1995–2015 Gender breakdown of authors of Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction shortlisted titles, 2000–2015 Gender breakdown of authors of Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry shortlisted titles, 2000–2015 Gender breakdown of Miles Franklin Literary Award judging panels, 1965–2015 Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction judging panels, 1985–2015 Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry judging panels, 1985–2015

xi

153 159 161 162 165 166 167

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table Table Table Table

4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3

Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5

The most reviewed authors per decade, per publication Top-selling titles reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian Adelaide Writers Week panel discussion topics, 1966–2015 Melbourne Writers Festival panel discussion topics, 1986–2015 All-first nations author panel discussion topics Miles Franklin Literary Award prize money, 1965–2015 Authors who have won multiple literary prizes Proportion of prize-winning authors to multiple winning authors, per gender Gender breakdown of men and women winners of American literary prizes Proportion of shortlists versus proportion of prizes per gender Bestselling and prize-winning/shortlisted titles across multiple years Proportion of authors who interact with two agents of consecration Change of agent interaction over time Average no. authors engaging with each agent of consecration, per decade Top 10 reviewed authors, 1965–2015 Top 10 festival appearances, 1966–2015

67 78 114 114 115 130 155 156 157 160 169 184 185 185 189 191

xiii

xiv

LIST OF TABLES

Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10 Table 6.11

Top 10 prize shortlists, 1965–2015 Authors with high symbolic and economic capital, 2003–2015 Authors who interact with multiple agents of consecration Authors who interact with three agents of consecration: book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes Authors with significant accumulated symbolic capital First nations authors who interact with multiple agents of consecration

192 195 197 198 200 203

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Following the selection of all-male shortlists for the 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the subsequent launch of the Stella Prize for women’s writing in 2013, interest in the institutions of power that feed Australia’s literary canon intensified, giving rise to questions about gender bias in the way symbolic capital is accumulated in the Australian literary field. Research into the relationship between gender and the ways in which literary reputations are established and maintained in various sectors of the field has been undertaken throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but what is lacking—until now—is a longitudinal study of the interplay between various consecratory agents in the industry, and how these agents intersect with gender. This book contributes to and extends the current debate around the critical reception of women authors in Australia and the broader Anglophone literary field, with the aim of understanding how authors build their reputations and accumulate prestige in contemporary book publishing. How is prestige accumulated by authors in the Australian publishing field and how does the struggle for legitimacy that defines actions within the field of cultural production differ for women and men? It is important to acknowledge that although women authors have been under-represented within the institutions that contribute to an author’s reputation, gender is not the only factor that can influence prestige and power in the literary field; scholars have observed that publishing © The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_1

1

2

A. DANE

and consecratory institutions in Australia and the UK are overwhelmingly white spaces (Kon-Yu 2016; Squires 2017) and any research into the unequal distribution of symbolic capital needs to encompass both gender and race. In ‘Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture’, Toril Moi notes that, ‘although social agents are undoubtedly always gendered, one cannot always assume that gender is the most relevant factor in play in a given social situation’ (Moi 1991: 1037, original emphasis). Natalie Kon-Yu (2016) notes, however, that research of this kind can be difficult and, in and of itself, problematic. In order to approach this research from an intersectional standpoint, where appropriate and where I am able, the relationship between prestige and race—and particularly the relationship between prestige and First Nations Australians—will be addressed through the prism of gender. This study is situated within a broader Anglophone book publishing field, alongside territories such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. Many of the issues around access and inclusion explored in this volume are commonly observed within these other national contexts. The multifaceted nature of Anglophone publishing establishes literary fields that are often simultaneously transnational and parochial. This amphibious nature is perhaps more profound in smaller markets like Australia’s or Canada’s—where the influence of British and American authors and publishing models have a long-standing influence on the structure of the field—but is nonetheless evident in all Anglophone publishing fields. The case studies explored throughout this volume are situated within the Australian field, however, they are not unique to the Australian field (see Marsden and Squires 2019; Neuwirth 2019).

‘To Be Australian, a Woman and a Writer’1 This book exists within a history of scholars working to understand and illuminate the gendered nature of the literary field. Read together, they offer an insight into the long-standing and robust structure of Australia’s literary field and the ways in which power, prestige and reputation operate. The theme of a polarised structure that is rooted in author gender emerges from this research, where the writing is serious/not serious, legitimate/illegitimate, important/frivolous depending on the

1 Giulia Giuffre, To Be Australian, a Woman and a Writer (London, 1987).

1

INTRODUCTION

3

gender of the author, dichotomies that are employed to justify the field’s inherent inequality. This theme is identified as a ‘tactic’ by Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983). In exploring the gendered ‘double standard’ that plagues the publishing industry, Russ writes, ‘The trick in the double standard of content is to label one set of experiences as more valuable and important than the other’. This approach to ‘suppressing’ women’s writing, which is explored in much of the research into gender, women’s writing and the literary field, acts as an opaque force that gently guides the actions of those operating within the literary field, shoring up the positions of power and those who occupy them. The characteristics that define the structure of Australia’s literary field can be traced back to the emergence of the nation’s literary scene in the nineteenth century. In her study of gender and Australian novels published from the 1830s to the 1930s, Katherine Bode (2008) notes that before the 1840s, novels were not perceived as a valuable cultural form, and writing novels was almost exclusively the pursuit of women writers. As the number of male novelists writing in Australia grew throughout 1840– 1870, so too did their legitimacy among critics and reviewers (Bode 2008: 439). From the 1880s, the novel began to be redefined as a masculine cultural product, one that made a significant contribution to cultural life, and the number of published novels written by men surpassed the number written by women, despite the fact that more women were submitting their work to publishing houses (Bode 2008: 439, 411). In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu (1996: 297) notes that the concepts or ideas that form the foundation of the appreciation of a cultural product are linked to the historical context in which they are created. Bode’s research illustrates the ways in which the relationship between gender and literary legitimacy have long been tied, and that gender has been a constant factor in the perception of value in the literary field. In her study of the critical reception of Australian novelists, Bode (2008: 455) describes the ‘essentialist understanding of literature’: aligning with the dichotomy where ‘maleness’ is associated with ‘serious’ fiction. The ‘essentialist understanding of literature’ that Bode describes was the status quo in the nineteenth century, and Bode’s research shows that many women authors received little or no critical attention for their published work. The critical reception of mid-twentieth-century women authors was similar to those who were writing in the period from 1880 to 1930. Susan Sheridan’s (2011: 2) study of post-war women writers describes

4

A. DANE

Australia’s literary scene as a place where women were more or less invisible; men almost exclusively occupied the positions of power as publishers, editors, critics and lecturers. Writing by women attracted scant critical attention during this period, a time where there was a growing distinction between ‘serious’ literary fiction and popular fiction (2011: 3). Again, through Sheridan’s work, we see that dichotomy where the notion of the seriousness of the work is closely related to the gender of the author, and the gendered assumptions that underpin this dichotomy are maintained by the ‘invisibility’ of women writers in this period. In Damned Whores and God’s Police, Anne Summers (1975: 39) describes the literary scene in 1975 as a place where the standards of literary value were devised, established and consequently administered by men. Literature exploring women’s experiences, Summers argues, did not conform to what was deemed important or of literary value. Julianne Lamond’s research (2011: 32) echoes this idea—that the experience and ideas of women do not fit the valued aesthetic of Australia’s literary culture—and notes that certain types of experiences are considered ‘more Australian’ than others. This dichotomy continues to be identified in the research into the contemporary field. Writing about the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Katherine Bode and Tara Murphy (2014: 184) contend that factors existing outside of a text make it more likely that an author will attract attention from the agents of consecration. These external factors can often be seen to be either explicitly gendered or the result of a field that has long expressed a preference for particular forms of writing from particular types of writers. Lamond (2011: 34) takes this idea further by suggesting that the ideas underpinning literary value in the Australian context were defined in opposition to femininity, and bias is embedded in the way we think about value, literature and gender. Similarly, author and editor Sophie Cunningham states: ‘it is harder for a woman’s work to be considered literary or taken seriously’ (2011: 15). Again the themes of legitimacy, value and seriousness are cited for reasons why a pervasive gender gap exists in the critical reception of writing in Australia. But are the biases and ‘external factors’ described by Bode and Murphy, Lamond and Cunningham a consciously maintained factor in the literary field? Do consecratory agents seek to ensure that the structure of the field is constant and the powerful stay powerful? Speaking on behalf of her fellow Miles Franklin Literary Award judges, Morag Fraser remarked that the judges had not considered gender when they selected the 2009 all-male shortlist, and did not realise that there was

1

INTRODUCTION

5

a complete absence of women authors until the list had been published (Cunningham 2011: 11). The 2009 and 2011 all-male Miles Franklin shortlists are perhaps a contemporary example of what Bode calls the ‘essentialist understanding of literature’: the unconscious or even subconscious ideas and dispositions that underpin the production and reception of literary texts in Australia. This research seeks to understand how this unconscious disposition is established and perpetuated.

Marginalised Genders and the Australian Literary Field A longitudinal study of this nature brings with it a number of methodological complexities. Over a 50-year period, definitions, knowledges and mainstream understandings around gender shift, making it difficult to establish a consistent measure. In the following chapters, I explore the research methods used in this study, however, it is important here to acknowledge and seek to reconcile the complex nature of gender and the aims of this study. In the tradition of research such as the VIDA count in the United States and the Stella Count in Australia, this study seeks to establish a quantitative understanding of the ways in which gender and prestige intersect in the Australian literary field. Work of this kind relies on a definition of gender as something that is binary in nature, which in reality it isn’t. However, this understanding was broadly accepted and was rarely interrogated in the mainstream, for much of the period that this book covers, 1965–2015. So where the quantitative data presented in this volume exists within the epistemological realm of woman/man, the discussion surrounding this data seeks to consider the what the gender gap between men and women authors means more broadly for the relationship between prestige and authors marginalised within the field on the basis of gender. Chapter 2, Power and Prestige in the Australian Literary Field, provides the historical and theoretical context for the study of the evolving relationship between gender, book publishing and systems of prestige building over the period from 1965 to 2015. It is in this chapter that I detail the conceptual framework that guides this study: Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field of cultural production, and the interplay between agents in the field in their struggle for positions and power. The chapter presents a modified Bourdieusian framework for the analysis of the relationship between gender and prestige in the contemporary

6

A. DANE

Australian publishing field, a rearticulation of Bourdieu’s model to reflect the contemporary realities of the Australian publishing climate. I ask how the disposition of individuals operating within the literary field influences practice, and how the actions of the agents in the field, and of the field itself, establish understandings of prestige and value and, therefore, positions of power. This chapter concludes with an outline of the methods used to answer the questions that underpin this research. In Chapter 3, The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews, I scrutinise the book reviewing gender gap and the ways in which book reviews, book reviewers and literary editors help to establish the reputations of authors. Through an analysis of the reviews in Australian Book Review, The Age and The Australian from 1965 to 2015, I raise questions around contemporary reviewing practice and the rigid notions of gender and literary merit that help keep the ceiling for the representation of women authors firmly in place. This chapter builds upon the work of Harvey and Lamond (2016), Stella Count and the VIDA Count, as well as activist research by the Women in Publishing collective (Cooter et al. 1987) and Spender (1989) that revealed a gender gap in the space given to women’s writing among the major reviewing publications. The results of this analysis illuminate the entrenched reviewing practices, especially where male reviewers are concerned, that contribute to the continued existence of this gap. But it is not only reviewing practice that ensures this gap between men and women persists, but also editorial practices, the constant threat to the number of pages dedicated to book reviewing in the newspapers, and the broader perceptions around women, writing, literary value and authority. As a microcosm of the broader literary field, literary festivals—in this case Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival—offer the opportunity to assess the interplay between agents on a small scale. In Chapter 4, Celebration, Performance and Authority: Gender and Literary Festivals, I use the concept of the literary festival as a field, as articulated by Weber (2018), to examine the complex hierarchies at play within fields of cultural production, and explore how gender intersects with these hierarchies. This analysis finds that although inclusiveness, diversity and the representation of marginalised authors are often lauded as features of the various writers’ festivals, men still dominate the most high-profile events in the program and women are more likely to play the secondary or supportive role as panel moderator and conversation facilitator. It

1

INTRODUCTION

7

appears that deep-seated ideas around gender and authority are difficult to overcome, even for festival programmers. Chapter 5, Hierarchies of Legitimacy: Gender and Literary Prizes, presents an analysis of the relationship between gender and literary prizes. In this chapter, I raise questions around the symbolic violence that lies at the heart of the institution of the literary prize, the changing nature of this relationship between prizes and gender for both winners and shortlisted authors, and whether the gender representation on a judging panel influences the gender of the winning author. This chapter draws on the work of James English (2002, 2005), Sharon Norris (2006), Beth Driscoll (2009, 2014), and Claire Squires (2013) to understand the place prizes hold in Bourdieu’s (appropriated) framework of cultural production, and the ability of literary prizes to identify and confer literary value within the field and beyond. In Chapter 6, Intersecting and Interacting Agents of Consecration: Gender and the Australian Publishing Field, I consider the ways that these four agents of consecration interact, identify the ‘most consecrated authors’ according to the metrics used in this study’s model, explore the limitations of this model, and analyse the relationship between these metrics and sales. It brings together the four chapters that come before it to answer questions around the power of the various sectors, where they overlap, and the influence of symbolic capital—and whether it can translate to economic capital—beyond the literary field. This is an analysis of the way gender intersects with power, or the pursuit of power, in Australian publishing, and how this evolved in the 50 years to 2015. The chapter concludes by identifying the directions in which future study could go, and the questions around representation, inclusiveness and perceptions of literary merit that still need to be answered. Despite the ever-changing nature of the literary field, institutions that celebrate books and authors have been a constant presence. These institutions—book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes—operate as top-down tastemaking agents that, whether consciously or unconsciously, work together to maintain a particular structure of the industry where the writing of white male authors continues to dominate. Both the establishment and the effect of this structure can be, in part, attributed to and observed in the historical and contemporary lack of diversity in the Australian school ‘classroom canons’ where the bedrock of literary appreciation is established and reinforced (Bourdieu 1967; McDonald 2016; Yiannakis 2014). Observing the ways in which taste is constructed in

8

A. DANE

the literary field, through the identification and reidentification of particular authors as legitimate producers of literary works, helps to shed light on the barriers to prestige and reputation that traditionally marginalised authors face. The following chapter establishes the foundation for understanding the ways in which gender and prestige intersect in the literary field, and for analysing the ways in which agents of consecration increasingly work in tandem to establish and maintain literary reputations and systems of power. Conceptualising both the historical and the contemporary practice of literary tastemaking in the Australian literary field, and the structured interdependent hierarchy of positions that structure the field, enables us to identify and analyse the exclusionary and deeply gendered nature of the way literary prestige is amassed.

References Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bode K and Murphy T (2014) Methods and Canons: An Interdisciplinary Excursion. In: Longley Artur P and Bode K (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu P (1967) Systems of Education and Systems of Thought. International Social Science Journal 19(3): 338–358. Bourdieu P (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cunningham S (2011) A Prize of One’s Own: Flares, Cock-Forests and Dreams of a Common Language. Kill Your Darlings: 6. Available at: https://killyourdarlings.com.au/article/a-prize-of-ones-own-flarescock-forests-and-dreams-of-a-common-language. Accessed 3 July 2018. Driscoll B (2009) The Politics of Prizes. Meanjin 68: 71–78. Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. English J (2002) Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards and the Rules of Art. New Literary History 33(1): 109–135. English J (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1

INTRODUCTION

9

Harvey M and Lamond J (2016) Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013. Australian Humanities Review 60: 84–107. Kon-Yu N (2016) A Testicular Hit-List of Literary Big Cats’. Overland 223: 14–20. Lamond J (2011) Stella Versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia. Meanjin 70(3): 32–39. Marsden S and Squires C (2019) The First Rule of Judging Club…: Inside the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. McDonald S (2016) On Not ‘Turning Back the Car’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the SACE English Studies’ List of Prescribed Texts. English in Australia 51(1): 46–52. Moi T (1991) Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. New Literary History 22(4): 1017–1049. Neuwirth C (2019) Speculative Archiving of a Potential Future Literary Award: Embedded Publishing Studies Research. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Norris S (2006) The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective. Journal for Cultural Research 10(2): 139–158. Russ J (1983) How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sheridan S (2011) Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Squires C (2013) Literary Prizes and Awards. In: Harper G (ed) A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 291–303. Squires C (2017) Publishing’s Diversity Deficit. CAMEo Cuts 2. Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies. UK: University of Leicester. Summers A (1975) Damned Whores and God’s Police. Melbourne: Penguin. Weber M (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yiannakis J (2014) Tallying a Possible Literary Canon in Upper School English Literature as Evidenced in Various Australian States, 1945–2005. Issues in Education Research 24(1): 98–113.

CHAPTER 2

Power and Prestige in the Australian Literary Field

The study of literary prestige is the study of a literary legacy. Consecratory institutions such as the literary prize contribute to a cultural narrative around an author and their contribution to the literary milieu in public and lasting ways. It is tempting when studying gender and literary reputation over the course of half a century to construct a context wherein women were completely invisible until the influence of the feminist second wave. This false narrative operates under the assumption that up until the late 1970s and 1980s there were not many women authors and that their writing did not hold any significance in the broader social field. The reality of the relationship between women and literary power is far more complex than simplistic notions of presence and visibility, and the notion that Australian book publishing was almost exclusively the pursuit of men establishes an inaccurate picture of the history of Australian publishing (Sheridan 2011: 2). Feminist revisionist literary histories that seek to uncover and celebrate the literary lives of women authors that have been lost to history have rewritten the common understanding of the role and influence of women and women’s writing within national literary traditions (see, for example, Ezell 1996; Sheridan 2011; Boyd Rioux 2016). Women have long been present in the Australian literary field, however, what the existence of the many revisionist feminist literary histories indicate is that despite their presence, women authors were excluded from legacy-making institutions and so were therefore routinely denied © The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_2

11

12

A. DANE

the opportunity to enter the collective public cultural memory. Understanding the long-term relationship between gender and prestige requires a nuanced and systematic approach that engages with the means of recognition and celebration such as book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes—that is, the institutions seek to connect authors and texts with the public life of literature and literary discourse—as the historical erasure of women authors and women’s writing has been enacted in a similarly nuanced and systematic way. The existence of, or requirement for, feminist literary histories that seek to revise common historical narratives and correct gendered literary assumptions emerge from a practice of what academic and writer Joanna Russ termed the ‘suppression’ of women’s writing (1983). Despite the prevalence of published women writers from at least 1965 (see Fig. 2.1), the—often sub/unconscious—suppression of women’s writing through institutions of prestige has facilitated the need for the recovering of authors such as Amy Witting and Dorothy Green (Sheridan 2011). This book does not seek to uncover the lost work of women authors, rather it exposes the ways in which writers build a career that will be remembered through the continuous interactions with consecratory institutions that overtime help to establish a writer’s reputation. In this way, we can perhaps understand the rigidity of the white male literary canon and the systems of prestige and power that help shore up this ‘anxiously guarded structure’ (Bird 1997: 119). A fractious relationship between perceptions of cultural or artistic legitimacy and gender has a long history in Anglophone publishing. Rarely if ever does the representation of women in the book review pages of cultural magazines, literary journals and major newspapers match the proportion of women authors of literary fiction and non-fiction (Bode 2012: 116), calling into question the critical assumptions and biases around women’s writing that contribute to ahistorical invisibility. Observing the gendered patterns of discussion and recognition that establish and maintain both literary tastes and perceptions of value not only helps us to understand why feminist literary revisions continue to be published, but also illuminates the ways in which literary institutions such as festivals and prizes produce a powerful narrative around a national literary field that continues to influence the production and reception of literary texts. It is important to continue to acknowledge that the erasure of particular authors from the historical record by way of limiting access to

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

13

Fig. 2.1 Breakdown of Australian titles published, 1965–2015 (Source AustLit 2017a)

prestige-building institutions intersects with authors in a number of ways including, instead of or in addition to gender. White women’s proximity to power both within and beyond the literary field has ensured that their writing has consistently been published in Australia from the

14

A. DANE

nineteenth century and the erasure or suppression of white women’s writing historically manifests within consecratory institutions, a privilege not historically afforded to, for example, First Nations authors. This study of prestige in the Australian literary field uncovers an historical pattern of under-representation in the institution’s power and reputation in relation to an author’s gender, however, beyond gender, it speaks to the exclusionary practices of a cultural industry, and how this industry establishes cultural value, and the difficulties of transforming aesthetic assumptions and perceptions of prestige.

Approaching the Study of Prestige Book publishing is an industry in which the tension between culture and commerce is ever-present; this tension underpins the histories written about the production and reception of books, about pioneering editors, and influential publishing houses (see Curtain 1993; McPhee 2001; Schiffrin 2000; Thompson 2010). Contemporary debates about the ‘declining literary paradigm’ (Carter 2016; Davis 2007, 2016) and the rise of the ‘new literary middlebrow’ (Driscoll 2014) also grapple with the issue of commerce versus culture, and the constantly evolving literary field is often analysed through this lens. This book primarily focuses on the cultural side of the fence, evaluating the literary field as a sector within a broader cultural field of production. Rather than entering the scholarly fray to unpick the intricacies of culture versus commerce, I seek to understand and analyse the ways in which authors establish their reputations within the field of cultural production and to ascertain whether different groups, namely women authors, are afforded the same access to reputation-building institutions as their male counterparts. To date, there has not been a longitudinal study of the relationship between gender, prestige and power in the Australian field. This book addresses this gap by asking: how do gender, prestige and power interact in the publishing field, and how is the ‘culture’ part of the commerce or culture equation established and maintained? The commercial side of the industry, however, is not overlooked and throughout this work remains a constant and necessary consideration. The ‘intermediaries’ that traditionally ‘took it upon themselves … to defend what Bourdieu describes as the autonomous end of the field’—institutions such as the literary prize or book reviewing publications—have been the subject of increased scrutiny and criticism by women writers and writers of colour

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

15

(Davis 2018). This research documents the increasing representation of women authors within consecratory institutions. I argue that, almost uniformly, agents of consecration remain committed to the promotion of a particular kind of (white, male) prestigious author. Examining the processes by which authors amass a prestigious literary reputation in the publishing field can help provide an understanding of who has access to symbolic capital and which groups are limited in their access to, or are excluded from accessing, said capital. It is through an examination of the access and exclusion around prestigious positions in the literary field that the status quo and potential bias in the field can be illuminated, challenged and, over time, the field can evolve. The study of book publishing culture has not traditionally found comfort in any specific disciplinary home, however, study of the processes of power acquisition and positions within literary hierarchies does nestle neatly under the broad umbrella of cultural studies. The conceptual underpinning of cultural studies lends itself to an examination of literary and print cultures, a space ‘indelibly imprinted with the hierarchies of gender, racial, ethnic and sexual difference’ (Murray 2007: 13). Understanding the power relationships within a particular system or field is a key rationale of cultural studies (Barker and Jane 2016; During 2005; Nelson et al. 1992). Those who study culture do so with the objective of articulating how the production and consumption of culture ‘either reproduce[s] or…challenge[s] existing social ideologies and power relations’ (Stevenson 2000: 4). Identity and hierarchy are chief themes among the concerns of this study, I ask: what is the nature of the relationship between the cultural judgements of agents in the publishing industry and an author’s gender? Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of the literary field and relationships within it provides a framework for understanding the ways in which the trappings of prestige are accumulated in Australian publishing. Bourdieu’s description of the field of cultural production is often used to examine the relational structure of cultural industries. James English (2005), David Hesmondhalgh (2006), Claire Squires (2007), John Thompson (2012), Millicent Weber (2018), Beth Driscoll (2014), and David Carter (2016) have used this relational structure of the field of cultural production to analyse power and practices literary culture. Support for Bourdieu’s theory often originates in its ability to describe the interdependent power relationships between different agents in a field, and the way that actions among agents can influence positions in the field’s hierarchy. In her study

16

A. DANE

of the new literary middlebrow, Beth Driscoll (2014) deploys Bourdieu’s field of cultural production to define and analyse the space between the literary field’s two poles, acknowledging the advantages of Bourdieu’s theory in its ability to help us understand the complex pattern of cultural behaviours that form contemporary book culture (2014: 5). For Driscoll, Bourdieu provides a framework for understanding the ways in which the various agents in the fieldwork in concert to establish the perceived value of a literary text (2014: 26). John Thompson (2012: 4) similarly uses Bourdieu’s field theory in his analysis of publishing in the twenty-first century to highlight the ‘complex space of power and interdependency’ that characterises the literary field. Following in this scholarly tradition, I use Bourdieu’s conception of the field of cultural production as the theoretical frame for analysis. In this structure, prestige is the power an agent possesses, or the position they occupy, within the field of cultural production: the result of accumulated symbolic capital, as set out by Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996). Symbolic capital, a profit that is neither economic nor political but rather is the accumulated recognition by one’s peers as a legitimate agent (Bourdieu 1993: 75), and can be distributed or acquired in a range of ways. One’s position within the cultural field is determined by their accumulated symbolic wealth. Claire Squires (2007) perhaps provides the most compelling case for the use of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production as a tool for understanding the way that agents operate within the field, especially in a study of this scope. Squires (2007: 56) writes: The persuasiveness of Bourdieu’s model is that it can encompass discussions of the text itself (without resorting to Formalist or New Critical description), the writer (without an over-heavy reliance on biography), the audience (without resorting to sociological stratifications), the intermediate producers—the publishers, printers, and so on (without reducing them to a mechanistic role within a theory of social or economic relations)—and also the manifold agencies who create symbolic value, such as prize givers and critics (without forgetting their place in the field as a whole).

Squires’ articulation of the utility of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production encapsulates the ways in which relationships and power bids can be studied in a thoughtful and systematic manner, without ending up bound in theoretical or sociological knots.

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

17

Although Bourdieu’s field of cultural production is a useful framework through which the interdependent power structure of the publishing field can be explored, the space where the positions of power in the field are situated and concentrated, as set out by Bourdieu almost three decades ago, does not necessarily fit the constraints of Australia’s contemporary publishing field. As many scholars acknowledge, Bourdieu’s theory does not always fit neatly with the contemporary structure of Anglophone publishing, and modification is required to understand how status is achieved in the contemporary Australian publishing context. Bourdieu’s field is ‘fundamentally binaristic’ and is a model that ‘requires some modification to fully account for the contemporary literary field’ (Driscoll 2014: 5, 15). The theory needs to be updated if it is to be applied to the contemporary Anglophone industry. A particularly anachronistic feature of the framework is Bourdieu’s rigid distinction between the commercial and the cultural ends of the field, which fails to recognise the nuanced relationship between culture and commerce that defines the contemporary publishing climate. The theory is a model based on the particularities that characterised the French literary field in the nineteenth century, and does not neatly apply to a contemporary Australian context, a field that has experienced significant restructuring with the emergence of multinational publishing and bookselling conglomerates (Carter 2016: 52; Hesmondhalgh 2006: 120). While it is clear that Bourdieu’s model is an effective tool for analysing the relationships between agents, structure, power and prestige, the model requires adjusting to effectively study the way authors accumulate prestige in Australian publishing. An appropriate adaptation of Bourdieu’s model for studying prestige and power in the literary field is likely to emerge by reassessing the ‘binaristic’ nature of the framework and looking towards the middle. Bourdieu’s framework fails to articulate the characteristics of the space between the two extremities of the field in any real detail, something that needs to be addressed in a contemporary appropriation. Looking towards the centre of the field, to the middlebrow as it is often called, is fundamental in the discussion of literary value in contemporary fields as, ‘in both subtle and overt ways, reverence for prestigious literary works … runs through the literary middlebrow’ (Driscoll 2014: 4). The status of an author or text within today’s literary field is not dependent on the trope of the obscure, avant-garde author whose work is written for the sake of art and is recognised by only an elite group of producers; the ‘most influential players’ of modern literary culture are ‘prize administrators, TV

18

A. DANE

producers, educators, reviewers, festival organizers’: the cultural intermediaries who are vital in the contemporary accumulation of symbolic capital (Driscoll 2014: 4). The commercial realities of Australian publishing mean that the power to define and instil value and legitimise producers and texts is not necessarily concentrated in the positions occupied by those autonomous producers free from the constraints of capitalism. While these authors do exist in Australia’s field of literary production, without any commercial viability they struggle to exert power within (or outside) the field. The power in Australia’s literary field lies further towards the middle of the field: the space where high cultural aspirations meet the realities of the market (Davis 2007: 94). These are authors who are producing cultural goods for their peers while also attracting the attention of agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries inside and outside the field of cultural production. It is the combination of symbolic and economic power that fosters the power to prescribe value and the actions of consecratory institutions such as reviewing publications, literary festivals and literary prizes have both symbolic and economic effects. Despite presenting a seemingly rigid hierarchical structure of the field of cultural production, when writing on ‘the author’s point of view’ (1996: 216), Bourdieu does concede that although symbolically wealthy authors are ‘liberated’ from the demands that exist external to the field of cultural production, the need for profits (be they economic or political) remains. This is why it is vital that a study of this research into the contemporary Australian literary field accounts for both the distribution of symbolic capital and the way that symbolic capital interacts with, or leads to, economic rewards. Symbolic Capital and Literary Prestige The accumulation of symbolic capital—and the associated prestige or reputation—does not occur without a structured set of conventions: power is not simply an equation in which increased symbolic capital equals an improved position in the field. The habitus of the individuals in the literary field, their shared ingrained social habits, skills and attitudes, regulate the process from symbolic capital acquisition to prestige, this is the ‘mediations through which dispositions are adjusted to positions’ (Bourdieu 1993: 64). The Australian literary field is characterised by an ‘essentialist understanding of literature’ that Bode (2008: 439) describes, whereby the notion of the inherent value of the writing of white

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

19

men is commonly agreed upon and uncontested, or by the entrenched ideas about gender, importance and literary value that are explored by Lamond (2011: 32). The habitus should not be considered in isolation; rather, it exists within and is an intrinsic part of action, belief, positions and production within the field (Wacquant 2016). This pervasive inertia helps to establish field-wide structures and assumptions, and the continual rearticulation of value, merit and prestige through the distribution of symbolic capital works to confirm the strength, and perpetuate the validity, of the status quo. In the case of the literary field in Australia and similar Anglophone territories, this status quo often manifests adversely for women and authors of colour, and leads to systemic and often disproportionate under-representation within institutions concerned with literary consecration. Bourdieu did not explicitly outline the role that gender plays in the framework he set out in The Field of Cultural Production or The Rules of Art: for this he has drawn criticism from many feminist scholars (see Adkins 2004; Fowler 2003; McCall 1992). Nevertheless, the structure of the field of cultural production is a useful lens through which to examine the relationship between various groups within the field, and in the case of this study, the way that actions within the field intersect with women authors, symbolic capital and power (Moi 1991: 1018). Leslie McCall (1992: 837) sees Bourdieu’s theory as a ‘powerfully elaborate conceptual framework for understanding the role of gender in the social relations of modern capitalist society’. In Gender and Symbolic Violence (2004), Bourdieu explores the way that ‘symbolic domination’ (that is, an often invisible but significant form of domination) of women pervades the structure of the social and cultural fields—and, in turn, their habitus— to influence ‘schemes of perception, appreciation and action’ (340). This idea is reminiscent of Toril Moi’s ‘feminist appropriation’ of Bourdieu’s theory, which notes that ‘taste and judgement are the heavy artillery of symbolic violence’ (1991: 1026). In other words, actions taken in the field of cultural production are done so within a system where these actions can be gendered but are often veiled as otherwise. In Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) explore the way that symbolic violence works to establish and maintain hierarchies of power in the cultural industries. While symbolic violence is not unique to the field of cultural production, vague notions of ‘value’, ‘merit’ and what constitutes ‘literature’ ensure that symbolic violence enacted within the literary field can often go

20

A. DANE

undetected. Within the literary field, the powerful are able to ‘impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations that are the basis of its force’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 4). Moreover the ‘arbitrary’ nature of ‘dominant legitimacy’ exists to ensure that the powerful retain their power (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 23) and, ‘the dominated adopt the “prevailing opinion”, the world-view developed by the dominant’ (Krais 2000: 59). Author Anne Enright (2017) similarly observes the nature of dominance. Writing about the representation of women authors in the Irish literary field, Enright (2017) notes: What is the difference between authority and dominance? I didn’t understand the game of top dog until I got an actual dog, when I realised that domination requires submission.

The ‘game of top dog’ is symbolic violence at play, a practice that underpins position-taking in the field of cultural production; something that is seen again and again in the analysis presented in this volume. The habitus of the field, and of the agents that occupy the field, is a force worth examining when considering the relationship that gender plays in the accumulation of power and prestige. One’s gender, and the expression of that gender, is an intrinsic part of an agent’s habitus (Krais 2006: 172). Moving beyond the individual to the broader habitus of the field, McCall (1992: 842) observes that the distribution of capital, and capital itself, is gendered because this practice is informed by the underlying gendered habitus of the field. Moi (1991: 1030) similarly regards the habitus of the field as gendered, asserting that the inherent gendered nature of the field is such that agents who are men are more readily deemed as legitimate by other agents, and their power accepted as the norm. These ideas of Moi’s again parallel Bourdieu’s writings on symbolic violence, and again reflect Bode’s (2008: 455) notion of the ‘essentialist understanding of literature’. It is assumed that all agents in the field operate with the aim of obtaining dominant positions—and that those dominant agents defend the ‘status quo’ of the field in order to retain their dominance, making the habitus a force difficult to change. Examining symbolic violence can reveal the power of the habitus to determine the hierarchy of the field, as Bourdieu (2004: 341) notes:

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

21

The practical acts of knowledge and recognition of the magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated that are triggered by the magic of symbolic power and through which the dominated, often unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting the limits imposed.

It is difficult to see beyond the reach of the habitus, even for those who do not occupy dominant positions. In practice, the notion that the dominated contribute to the ‘limits’ they face in being defined as legitimate producers could be seen as the rejection of the need for, or validity of, the women-only Stella Prize in Australia by author Sonya Hartnett (Romei 2014), or the comments by British author AS Byatt about why fewer women have won the Booker Prize: perhaps men just write better books (Zangen 2003: 283). Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998, Bourdieu addresses the dominance of men and the often-unquestioned systems and institutions that quietly ensure the continuation of gendered social and cultural hierarchies. His mild-mannered call to transform the doxa (that which is taken for granted in the field), and in turn habitus, of the cultural, political and social fields focuses not on the ‘domestic sphere’ but rather on ‘locations such as the school … which function as places for the elaboration and imposition of principles of domination’ (Bourdieu 1998: n.p.). Here Bourdieu identifies the power of the school as an institution that can establish the foundations for dismantling male domination and addressing symbolic violence, pointing to the influence that the school system plays in the broader development of habitus and the importance of diverse and inclusive prescribed texts or ‘classroom canons’. A study of this nature cannot overlook the role of diverse and inclusive authors of the texts that students study in English and English Literature courses in their final years of high school; it would be an error to fail to engage with the potential effects that the critical interaction with a homogenous group of texts at school has on lasting cultural tastes. As Dolin et al. (2017: 3) observe, ‘“what gets taught” [in the classroom] also means “what assumptions about literature get taught”’. The inclusion of a title on a prescribed list of study identifies it as legitimate: a worthy example of literature. In their study of gender bias in secondary-school prescribed English texts, Sophie Allan and Beth Driscoll (2013: 128) observe that inclusion on the secondary-school syllabus has long been a marker of prestige, identifying the text as part of the nation’s literary canon. The literary canon is an ‘imaginary list’ (Guillroy 1993: 30)

22

A. DANE

and judgements made around whether a text or an author should be included in this imaginary collection most commonly manifest through the construction of a syllabus. Like any agent of consecration within the literary field, the discussion of titles and authors as part of a notional literary canon is a mode of legitimisation that serves to establish a belief in the cultural value of a text and power of an author. When it comes to the school syllabus, the idea of the canon is projected upon the texts that are ‘consumed and legitimised as objects of study’ (Guillroy 1993: 41). In his 1967 essay ‘Systems of Education and Systems of Thought’, Bourdieu discusses the power that the school syllabus has over the formation of the habitus at both an individual and at a societal level. Bourdieu (1967: 345) describes the school as an institution whose function is consciously … to transmit the unconscious or, to be more precise, to produce individuals equipped with the system of unconscious master-patterns that constitute their culture.

Bourdieu (1967: 347) goes on to explain that these ‘master-patterns’ of thought—patterns that contribute to the habitus of the individuals within the field of cultural production—establish the principles upon which hierarchies of cultural value are based. In their exploration of the relationship between literary value and the teaching of English, Dolin et al. (2017: 10) echo Bourdieu’s notion of the lingering influence that ‘classroom canons’ have on the habitus of the literary field: ‘schools produce powerful and enduring sentimental canons that influence whole generations of readers’. The idea that the school, and indeed the school syllabus, forms the foundation of one’s cultural habitus, and the doxa of the field of cultural production, is also recognised in Sarah McDonald’s 2016 study of the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) prescribed texts. McDonald (2016: 48) notes that ‘prescribed text lists play a part in suggesting a dominant ideology regarding who is given a voice and who is rendered voiceless’. Research into the prescribed text lists in various Australian states frequently point to the preference for one voice over another, or, rather, a lack of representation of traditionally marginalised voices in the syllabus. In his study of Australian prescribed texts from 1945 to 2005, John Yiannakis (2014: 99) observes that the process of identifying texts that are worthy of study is a kind of canon formation in and of itself. Furthermore, Yiannakis identified a consistency of authors and texts—which he

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

23

describes as a ‘core group’—in lists across the six decades he studied, supporting the notion that education authorities adhere to a group of texts and authors that could be called ‘canon’ (2014: 112). This dedication to the ‘core group’ suggests that ideas around literary value and legitimacy, and the ‘types’ of authors who write texts worthy of study, have remained consistent for decades. Yiannakis’ (2014: 111) study found that in 2005, in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales, the most frequently listed authors were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Chekhov, Conrad and Euripides. Ideas around the rigidity of the canon, author gender and ‘legitimacy’ are also observed in McDonald’s (2016) discourse analysis of the 2015 SASE English Studies prescribed text list. McDonald (2016: 48) states that the ‘ideas of white men are normalised, while those of women are marginalised’. McDonald (2016: 50) goes on to describe the power of prescribed text lists, observing that the list has the capacity to communicate to students whose ideas are important and, in turn, whose ideas are not. In light of Bourdieu’s explanation of the school as a place for the seeding of individuals’ and society’s cultural ‘master-patterns’, it is important to acknowledge the lack of non-white, non-male voices among the titles deemed legitimate and worthy of study. The influence of formal education on the development of literary sensibilities and tastes has been recognised by both scholars and literary institutions in the Australian literary field. The development of the Stella Schools program which ‘aims to bring about a lasting cultural shift in young people’s attitudes through its work in schools, its events program and its teaching resources’ and to ‘challenge stereotypes and imagine a future not limited by their gender’ (Stella Schools Program 2020), explicitly acknowledges the field-wide ripple effect of a homogenised white male English syllabus. In addition to their women’s literary prize, the Schools Program works to address the unconscious ‘master-patterns’ of literary taste in order to transform the rigid dispositions that reinforce the legitimacy of the publishing industry’s existing conditions. The education system works as a grassroots, ground-up influence on the literary field, sending future critics, editors, authors, publishers and prize judges into the world with a common understanding of what constitutes literature worthy of consideration. What I explore in this book, however, is the result of this education; the top-down tastemakers who define what constitutes literary value and whose proclamations and definitions feed the next generation of classroom canons. Understating how this power operates is essential to transforming it.

24

A. DANE

Building Literary Reputations in the Contemporary Literary Field Descriptions of the decline of literary publishing in Australia often overlook the institutions that have been working for more than 50 years to identify and celebrate the aesthetic and cultural contribution of literature (see Bode 2010; Carter 2007, 2016; Stinson 2016a; Zwar 2012). In an essay on Australian publishing’s past and future, author Richard Flanagan (2007) nods to this negative commentary but notes that it might not be the most accurate account of the history of and the future prospects for Australia’s literary field. Flanagan sees Australian publishing as a fledgling industry, ‘a cultural success story’, and Australian writing as ‘globally significant and sometimes cutting-edge’. And while he laments the ever-decreasing opportunities for critical engagement with Australian literature, Flanagan presents an opposing view of Australian publishing: a small industry harbouring cultural texts that should be revered. Davis, in his 2007 and 2016 eulogies to the Australian literary paradigm, similarly acknowledges the (albeit small) pushback to the increasing commercialisation of the field, a contemporary structure wherein the power vested in literary critics and literary prizes to define literary legitimacy and shape readerly tastes has been tempered. In 2007 he notes: Literary journals such as ABR and Meanjin and the book pages of broadsheet newspapers have set themselves up as the nostalgic guardians of a (mid-list) literary culture at odds with both the ‘postmodernist’ academy and the new commercial imperatives. Their valorisation of old-fashioned notions of aesthetic and artistic autonomy can be understood as part of an attempt to recover art as a space sealed off from market forces. (128)

Davis (2016) in addition notes that new literary journals such as the LA Review of Books or the Sydney Review of Books have been established in response to the increasing commercial nature of literary culture, where, at least notionally, the aesthetic considerations of a text are secondary to its commercial viability. The rise of literary prizes can be seen as an indicator that there are, in fact, important and widely recognised activities in the literary field where assessments of value are made along the lines of aesthetics and not sales performance; as Stevie Marsden and Will Smith (2019: 1) observe, ‘a prize serves to invoke the authority to intervene outside pre-existing market data’. The ubiquity of literary awards in the Australian publishing landscape serve as a reminder of the field’s longstanding commitment to the celebration of authors and texts, that serves

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

25

to ‘provide a continuous overview of national literary achievement for the past half-century’ (Munro and Sheahan-Bright 2006: 142). There is no doubt that the global shifts in the Anglophone publishing field over the past 50 years—especially changes to the structure and practices of book production and selling—have been felt greatly within the Australian context. Research by scholars such as David Carter, Mark Davis and Jan Zwar suggests that the dedication to, and appreciation of, the cultural and aesthetic significance of literary publishing has declined in recent years, particularly in the wake of newly available reader and consumer data. And while there has been a marked change in the modes of production and the positions of power in the literary field over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—changes brought about by the realities of the contemporary book market and reception environments— the influence of top-down, legacy tastemaking institutions such as book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes remains. What these studies do not consider are the various agents within the book publishing industry who continue to be motivated by the cultural contribution of books and publishing. While these agents may not be motivated by aesthetic considerations alone, they do exist and they do exert considerable power in the production and reception of literary works. In this volume I examine the agents in the literary sector who are motivated by celebrating the cultural contribution of books: the literary critics writing in journals and newspapers who champion what Davis (2007: 128) describes as ‘notions of aesthetic and artistic autonomy’; the administrators and adjudicators of literary prizes who, notionally, recognise and award authors based on the content of a title; and the literary festival administrators, panel chairs and panel members who provide time and space for public discussion of literary and cultural values. These agents have been fixtures of the Australian publishing field, to greater and lesser extents, for the past 50 years; however as this research demonstrates, it is only relatively recently that all four agents have worked in concert as institutions of reputation building. Throughout the ‘decline of the literary paradigm’, critics, prize judges and literary festival programmers have remained a constant reminder of the role and purpose of books within our national cultural sphere. This study is concerned with the selections they make, how these selections influence the broader publishing field, and the impact these judgements have on authors. Furthermore, this study seeks to understand the relationship between these judgements and gender, asking: does the

26

A. DANE

gender of an author influence their access to prestige in the publishing field? Book reviewing continues to be a source of prestige for authors in the Australian literary field (Nolan and Ricketson 2013; Harvey and Lamond 2016), especially in the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first. Two of Australia’s most prominent national book reviewing publications—Australian Book Review and The Australian newspaper—were established in the 1960s and continue to shape Australia’s literary discourse today. And while the role and prominence of book reviews in printed publications such as daily newspapers and cultural magazines may be under threat, for now these publications are an important and influential agent in the literary field: one that often acts as a gateway for engagement with literary festival programmers and literary prize judges. Critics hold significant authority in the publishing and cultural sphere and their judgements can have far-reaching effects on the careers of authors and the way literary value is understood (Harvey and Lamond 2016). While it is most likely that critics will engage with texts from across the field—from popular fiction to lifestyle non-fiction to avant-garde poetry—the aesthetic perspective of their criticism (Nolan and Ricketson 2019) makes their activity contrary to the shifting paradigm described by Davis (2007, 2016). Studies by literary and publishing scholars conducted over the 50 years to 2015 have shown that the representation of women authors and women reviewers is almost never equal to that of men, giving rise to questions around the ‘unofficial guidelines’ that determine which books and which authors are reviewed in the weekly and monthly literary press (see Cooter et al. 1987; Harvey and Lamond 2016; Spender 1989). This research builds upon these studies to understand the long-term relationship between gender and book reviewing practice, with the aim of understanding if and how men and women can exist equally within the book review pages of major publications. Like book criticism, the awarding of literary prizes is said to be based upon judgements made, in theory, on cultural and aesthetic grounds. James English (2005: 26) describes literary prizes as ‘cultural practice in its quintessential contemporary form’, and while the increasing convergence between prizes and the marketplace means that prizes are a site of consecration which is open to criticism, the winners are chosen with cultural imperatives in mind. It is difficult to argue with the contribution that literary prizes make to the Australian literary field when it comes to identifying and celebrating authors and their literary expression. And it

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

27

is similarly difficult to overlook the fact that since the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award was announced in 1957, just 17 women have benefited from the significant symbolic and economic rewards that come with being named the winner. The cultural authority of literary or writers’ festivals has come under scrutiny, particularly when considering their close ties with the marketplace. However, in terms of the scope of this study, the emphasis festivals place on the celebration of the significance of authors, literary works and literary culture makes them an important site of consideration. Beth Driscoll (2014) notes that literary festivals exhibit ‘reverential treatment of … literary authors’ and ‘promote the prestige of literature as a whole’. Carving out space for the exploration of literary practice and ideas is central to the existence of literary festivals and, despite opportunities to buy the book at the end of a session, the cultural significance of the text takes precedence over commercial opportunities (Johanson and Freeman 2012). Moreover, Weber (2018) sees the literary festival as a miniature literary field where tussles for positions in the interdependent hierarchy, and the exchange of symbolic, cultural and economic capital, lie at the core of the event. But as a microcosm of the broader field, the relationship between power and gender that plays out in the festival program and on the festival stage is never straightforward. The notion of a national literary canon looms large in the psyche of the collective field of cultural production. Debates rage among scholars, authors, publishers and critics around which authors and which texts might constitute an Australian literary canon, and which Australian authors and texts might be included in a transnational literary canon. In his explorations of literary canon formation, Guillroy (1993: 55) writes, ‘canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission, its relation to other works’. David Carter (1997: 21) similarly acknowledges that canons are the ‘outcome of social and cultural processes’ that are characterised by repeated selection by agents of consecration, based on aesthetic and somewhat ambiguous criteria. These definitions speak to the process of a text entering a canon, to the notion of the canon as an imaginary space, calling into question the modes by which this might occur. This book identifies and explores three key modes of this transmission, that is, the process by which a literary reputation is built, reputations that can lead to proclamations of canonicity: book reviewing and criticism, literary festivals and literary prizes. These mechanisms of literary reputation building are a vital and highly visible aspect of the Australian literary field.

28

A. DANE

Questions around the systems that feed our understanding of literary and aesthetic value have long plagued researches of culture and the imaginary literary canon. Verboord (2003: 262) acknowledges that it is not the role of the researcher to determine ‘literary quality’; rather, it is to observe the way pronouncements of quality are made and distributed in the field. Unpacking the difference between literary quality and literary prestige, Verboord observes that literary prestige is not something that exists intrinsically within the work itself or even the author, rather, it is constructed by the action of the agents within the field; ‘the production of belief’, as Bourdieu calls it (1993: 42). The socially constructed nature of literary or cultural value within and beyond the field of cultural production has been the subject of significant scholarly attention (see Carter 1997; Driscoll 2014; Fuller and Rehberg Sedo 2013; Lizé 2016; Sapiro 2016; Verboord 2003; Verdaasdonk 1983). The common thread that ties these scholars is the understanding that perceptions of literary value are produced by and are bound up within legitimised agents within the field, and that the actions of these agents have far-reaching ramifications for the cultural producers and for the field itself. The true producer of the value and of the meaning of an artwork is not the artist who actually creates it in its materiality, but the entire set of agents engaged in the field whose evaluations together can create symbolic value recognised by the broader community. (Lizé 2016: 1)

Verboord (2003: 262) makes a similar, albeit more pointed, assertion, stating: ‘an author’s prestige is dependent on how s/he is perceived by significant others’. For this study, the ‘significant others’ are identified as literary editors and book reviewers, literary festival programmers, and literary prize judges. In light of the pervasive nature of the habitus, and of the way the habitus seeks to moderate the actions of agents within the field, we can see how prestige can be understood in terms of the power of unchallenged notions of what is culturally valuable, and just how difficult it could be to change these aesthetic assumptions. Mechanisms for engaging with and celebrating books and writing have a long history in Australia with a lively tradition of book reviewing in newspapers and periodicals and the awarding of literary prizes. In the post-war years, Australia’s cultural environment was supported by a number of events and institutions dedicated to the discussion, dissemination and praise of literary work. The inaugural Miles Franklin Literary

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

29

Award was presented in 1957 and continued to grow in prominence and prize money throughout the 1960s and 1970s: winners included Patrick White, Thea Astley, George Johnston and Thomas Keneally. Throughout the 1960s, Melbourne’s annual Moomba Festival hosted an exhibition of Australian books at the Melbourne Town Hall, where a prize was awarded to the book ‘which in the opinion of the judges has made the greatest contribution in the last 12 months’ (Thompson 2006: 32). Adelaide Writer’s Week was first hosted in 1960, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s attracted a number of highly regarded literary authors and poets from around Australia and abroad. The 1970s saw an increase in the prominence of book reviews in broadsheet newspapers; literary critic John Colmer (1971: 351) noted in an assessment of the state of book reviewing that reviews in Australian newspapers ‘make a vital contribution to the cultural health of society’. Book reviewing practice, especially the criticism in smaller cultural magazines, has long been viewed as an essential part of Australian literary life, from the mid-1980s around 50% of Australia Council literary funding has been allocated to literary journals and magazines (Stevens 2004). For a literary field coming into its own in the mid-twentieth century these tastemaking institutions helped to establish the systems through which we now identify and define literary reputation. Institutions aimed at recognising the cultural and aesthetic value of literature continued to play a significant role throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and a number of literary prizes and festivals were added to the Australian publishing calendar. The Melbourne Writers Festival and the Sydney Writers Festival began during this period, joining a number of highly respected literary festivals such as those in Adelaide and in Perth (Starke 2006). There was also an increase in the number of literary prizes in Australia, with the introduction of more than nine major awards throughout the period, including the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Similarly, with a growing number of Australian books published, the book review pages of the major broadsheets continued to be an important site for the promotion of new titles and literary culture (Nolan and Ricketson 2013). This period saw a sharp increase in the number of consecratory institutions operating in the Australian literary field, but until now there has been little research assessing how these agents have interacted and worked together to identify the authors and titles ‘worthy’ of discussion and discourse, nor is there significant research that explores how the rise of these institutions in Australian literary culture has influenced the careers of women authors.

30

A. DANE

Conceptualising Literary Prestige In Distinction (1984), a text that is primarily concerned with the actions of the social field, beyond the field of cultural production, Bourdieu elucidates the notion of cultural intermediaries as agents who mediate the space between the production and consumption of cultural goods; they ‘authorise and reinforce’ cultural tastes and, therefore, the habitus (1984: 228). In The Field of Cultural Production (1993), wherein Bourdieu explores activity that occurs almost exclusively within the field of cultural production, Bourdieu uses the term ‘agents of consecration’ to identify the agents within the field of cultural production who, through selection and critical discourse, act as ‘producers of meaning and value’ in cultural texts (37). While the work of agents of consecration and the work of cultural intermediaries very often overlaps, I propose that the core functions and motivations of agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries differ. The effect of the work of agents of consecration exists exclusively within and for the field of cultural production; they distribute symbolic capital and, therefore, influence position-taking, power and the habitus. Moreover, as Sapiro (2016: 6) identifies, judgements made by agents of consecration within the field of cultural production are made according to ‘aesthetic’ considerations, reinforcing the autonomous nature (that is, independent of heteronomous factors such as politics or economics) of the field of cultural production. The ‘aesthetic’ judgements Sapiro (2016) describes help to facilitate symbolic violence in the field, and therefore, the maintenance of the dominant social class. Cultural intermediaries, on the other hand, are tasked with moderating the space between the production of cultural texts within the field of cultural production, and consumption of said texts (most commonly) beyond the field of cultural production, influencing the habitus of the social field. Many agents of consecration could also be considered cultural intermediaries, to varying degrees, as the activities of the field of cultural production do not occur in isolation. Similarly, the work of cultural intermediaries could be seen to contribute to the accumulated symbolic capital of an agent within the field of cultural production (Smith Maguire and Matthews 2012: 558). For the purposes of this study—where book reviews, literary prizes and literary festivals are explored—it is the work of these actors as consecrating agents that is pertinent. That is: how do these agents and authors interact within the Australian publishing field, how and to whom is symbolic capital distributed, and how is access to

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

31

this symbolic capital shaped by the gender of the author? The activities of cultural intermediaries, however, should not be overlooked, even though their primary role is interaction with those beyond the field of cultural production. In the contemporary Australian publishing field, where both the symbolic and economic capital of an author are vital for prestige and for survival, the work and influence of cultural intermediaries is important to keep in mind. Bourdieu (1993, 1984) looks to literary critics as the agents of consecration with the power to prescribe value to a text and legitimise its author. Driscoll (2014) also identifies these agents as integral to the production of literary value and power, but updates the group of consecratory institutions to include literary prizes and literary festivals, among others. Book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes form the foundation of this research, as these three agents possess the characteristics Smith Maguire and Matthews (2012) define as inherent in cultural intermediaries; however, it is their work inside the field of cultural production, specifically their actions to distribute symbolic capital, that I explore in this book. This research investigates to whom they distribute symbolic capital and how this activity interacts with the gender of those agents seeking to establish their legitimacy. There are, however, an increasing number of agents in the field of cultural production; and while it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate every agent who is involved in the act of ‘framing’ books, it is important to address the absence of bibliocentric social networking sites like Goodreads, and recommendation/e-commerce platforms like Amazon, in this study. With the advent of these platforms, the role of the audience or reader within the field of cultural production has shifted. Online spaces like Amazon, Goodreads and LibraryThing have revealed and capitalised on the power of readers and their reviews and recommendations (Nakamura 2013: 238). Davis (2018) observes: The power to consecrate cultural texts, now, rests in the hands of readers, algorithms and big data, in recommendation engines, book blogs and vlogs, hashtags, podcasts, on-line bookstore reviews, self-publishing portals, podcasts, literary portals, and Goodreads reviews.

Moreover, the rise of social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have shifted both the production and the dissemination of titles; platforms have facilitated unprecedented connection

32

A. DANE

between publishers, authors and readers (Ray Murray and Squires 2013). Because this is a relatively new development in the field, research into the reception of authors and texts within the digital space is beyond the scope of this longitudinal study. It would be methodologically difficult to undertake a 50-year survey of the relationship between gender, symbolic capital and the literary field and include a consistent and reliable measure of reader interaction. It is important, however, to keep in mind the evolution of agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries in the twenty-first-century literary field; new tastemaking institutions may have the ability to ‘problematise and destabilise’ (Davis 2018) the modes by which authors build their reputations. The role of readers is, however, incorporated into this study through the use of Nielsen BookScan sales data, which has been used throughout this thesis to assess the influence of agents of consecration beyond the field of cultural production. Investigating the modes by which authors accumulate prestige in Australia’s literary field, and evaluating whether particular authors or groups have greater access to that prestige, requires a mixed-methods approach. Employing both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis is an increasingly common methodological tactic in the study of book and publishing culture. The new literary empiricism, as described by Bode and Dixon (2009), aims to use a combination of empirical methods to answer long-standing questions from the literary field, particularly questions rooted in critiques of literary canon formation. Bode and Dixon describe this methodology as an ‘analysis of the political, economic, cultural and material context in which books are produced, circulated and received’, through an examination of intricate datasets and observation. Bringing together descriptive demographic data collected from various sites of prestige accumulation with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with agents from the field will help to provide a rich understanding of access to symbolic capital and power, and ensure confidence in the substance of my findings (Greene et al. 2005). David Carter (2009: 41) identifies four main characteristics that define new literary empiricism: an engagement with quantitative analysis across large data sets and historical periods; an aim to address the questions that define the field; an engagement with logics of the field that have been established through theory and a capacity to reshape the understanding of the field and its structure by working with both text and context. Moreover, Carter (2009: 42) notes that what makes this methodological approach innovative is the

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

33

capacity to reconfigure our understanding of the literary field—its structures and dynamics, its ‘political economy’, its temporalities—not just by supplying new information but through bringing a whole new set of objects and agents into view, working a kind of reversal of background and foreground, inside and outside, in the relation between text and context.

This study works with the characteristics of new empiricism set out by Carter, and does so with the aim of bringing new perspectives and understandings to a long-understood problem in the Australian literary field. Quantitative methods, especially when used in the study of books and culture, provide the opportunity to explore broad trends and industry patterns that would otherwise remain invisible (Bode 2012: 11; Neuwirth 2019). However, it is insufficient to rely on this dataset to explore the intricate inner workings of symbolic capital acquisition in the literary field. Jason Ensor (2009: 200) warns against leaning exclusively on quantitative data, stating that research conducted under the umbrella of new literary empiricism ‘should not operate too long without the support of … qualitative research’. In light of Ensor’s advice, context and perspective from agents in the field of cultural production provide depth and perspective to the data drawn from the sites of literary consecration. This research aims to enhance the understanding of the field and its structure by exploring the interplay between agents of consecration, and investigating how agents work in concert to establish and maintain literary reputations and power in the Australian literary field. Quantitative and qualitative data has been collected from the three agents of consecration—book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes—to interrogate the relationship between gender and prestige in the Australian literary field. Semi-structured interviews help to provide depth and nuance to the longitudinal descriptive demographic data offering rigorous descriptions of the Australian publishing field over a 50-year period. It is important to position myself in the research to support the rigour of my method and findings (Burns and Walker 2005). As a white, middle-class woman, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the place of privilege from which I conduct this research. The interaction that white Australian women have with the publishing field is different from the interaction that women of colour, and especially First Nations women, have with the publishing field. I do not wish to homogenise the experiences of all women in Australia who pursue symbolic capital or suggest

34

A. DANE

that all women experience equal access to symbolic capital and prestige. Any advancement in the position of women within Australia’s literary field over the 50 years to 2015 has primarily benefitted white women. The gendered demographic data labels used in this study are based on a binarism that does not adequately represent the whole gender spectrum. When referring to an agent’s gender—for example, a woman author or a woman book reviewer—this refers to the self-prescribed gender identity of that agent, based on biographical information available on the AustLit database, an author’s website, data sourced from the literary prize or literary festival website and in some cases, an author’s Wikipedia entry. The AustLit database is the most comprehensive collection of data on the Australian literary field and is a common source of information and data for researchers (AustLit 2017b). The First Nations heritage of an author is determined by searching for each author using the BlackWords database, which is housed within AustLit. The BlackWords database is a record of First Nations writers and storytellers. As stated in the information provided about the database, ‘BlackWords aims to include appropriate biographical information about Australian writers and storytellers identifying with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritages’ (BlackWords 2017). BlackWords only records the First Nations heritage of authors who ‘publicly claim these heritages themselves or the information is recorded in the public domain’ (BlackWords 2017). There is no such database that provides comprehensive information on the broader cultural identities of Australian writers or documents Australia’s writers of colour. For this reason, examining the proportion of all women of colour who have access to prestige, while important, is beyond the scope of this study. Due to the reliance on these sources to determine the gender and First Nations heritage of the agents in this study, it is possible that the datasets are slightly inaccurate. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the datasets. The following chapters draw upon this foundation to examine the long-term gender prestige gap that pervades the Australian literary field, from 1965 to 2915. Taking a historical quantitative approach allows us to observe the difficulties of transforming field-wide power structures and illustrates the pervasive influence of unconscious or unchecked biases.

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

35

References Adkins L (2004) Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and After. Sociological Review 52(2): 1–18. Allan S and Driscoll B (2013) Making the List: The Value of Prizes for Women Writers and the Construction of Educational Reading Lists. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 127, 140. AustLit (2017a) Data Extracted from Advanced Search of Database, Literary Titles Published 1965–2015. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. AustLit (2017b) About AustLit. Available at: https://www-austlit-edu-au.ezp. lib.unimelb.edu.au/about. Accessed 13 November 2018. Barker C and Jane E A (2016) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage Bird D (1997) Women Writers, Gendered Readings, Literary Politic. Southerly 57(3): 115–124. BlackWords (2017) AustLit Database. BlackWords: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bode K (2010) Publishing and Australian Literature: Crisis, Decline or Transformation? Cultural Studies Review 16(2): 24–48. Bode K (2012) Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London: Anthem Press. Bode K and Dixon R (2009) Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age? In: Bode K and Dixon R (eds) Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 1–31. Bourdieu P (1967) Systems of Education and Systems of Thought. International Social Science Journal 19(3): 338–358. Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu P (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu P (1998) On Male Domination. Le Monde Diplomatique, October. Available at: https://mondediplo.com/1998/10/10bourdieu. Accessed 7 July 2018.

36

A. DANE

Bourdieu P (2004) Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu P and Passeron J (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Boyd Rioux (2016) Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. New York: W. W. Norton. Burns D and Walker M (2005) Feminist Methodologies. In: Somekeh B and Lewin C (eds) Research Methods in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 66–74. Carter D (1997) Literary Canons and Literary Institutions. Southerly 57(3): 16– 37. Carter D (2007) Boom, Bust or Business as Usual? Literary Fiction Publishing. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 231–254. Carter D (2009) The State and Future of the Discipline. Structures, Networks, Institutions: The New Empiricism, Book History and Literary History. In: Bode K and Dixon R (eds) Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 31–53. Carter D (2016) The Literary Field and Contemporary Trade-Book Publishing in Australia: Literary and Genre Fiction. Media International Australia 158(1): 48–57. Colmer J (1971) Book Reviewing in Australian Newspapers. Meanjin Quarterly, September: 344–352. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Curtain J (1993) Book Publishing. In: Cunningham S and Turner G (eds) The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, pp. 102–119. Davis M (2007) The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 116–132. Davis M (2016) The Changing Literary Ecology. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 47–67. Davis M (2018) Who Needs Cultural Gatekeepers Anyway? Australian Literary Culture and Its Post-Digital Anxieties. Sydney Review of Books, 17 July. Available at: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/who-needs-cultural-gatekeepersanyway/. Accessed 17 July 2018. Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (2017) Conditional Assent: Literary Value and the Value of English as a Subject. In: Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (eds) Required Reading: Literature in Australian Schools Since 1945. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 3–19.

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

37

Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. During S (2005) Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. London, New York: Routledge. English J (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Enright A (2017) Diary. London Review of Books 39(18): 33–35. Ensor J (2009) ‘Still Waters Run Deep’: Empirical Methods and the Migration Patterns of Regional Publishers’ Authors and Titles Within Australian Literature. Antipodes, December: 197–209. Ezell M J M (1996) Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Flanagan R (2007) Colonies of the Mind, Republics of Dreams: Australian Publishing Past and Future. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 132–115. Fowler B (2003) Reading Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination: Notes Towards an Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Culture and Class. Cultural Studies 17(3–4): 468–494. Fuller D and Rehberg Sedo D (2013) Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London, New York: Routledge. Greene J C et al. (2005) Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Social Inquiry. In: Someck B and Lewin C (eds) Research Methods in the Social Sciences. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, pp. 274–293. Guillroy J (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey M and Lamond J (2016) Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013. Australian Humanities Review 60: 84–107. Hesmondhalgh D (2006) Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production. Media, Culture and Society 28(2): 211–231. Johanson K and Freeman R (2012) The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the contemporary Audience. Continuum 26(2): 303–314. Krais B (2000) Gender Relationships in Bourdieu’s Society. Sub-Stance 93: 53– 67. Krais B (2006) Gender, Sociological Theory and Bourdieu’s Sociology of Practice. Theory, Culture & Society 23(6): 119–134. Lamond J (2011) Stella Versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia. Meanjin 70(3): 32–39. Lizé W (2016) Cultural Consecration and Legitimation: Modes, Agents and Processes. Poetics 59: 1–4.

38

A. DANE

Marsden S and Smith W (2019) And the Winner Is…? Prizes and Awards in Arts and Culture. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. McCall L (1992) Does Gender Fit? Bourdieu, Feminism, and Conceptions of Social Order. Theory and Society 21: 837–867. McDonald S (2016) On Not ‘Turning Back the Car’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the SACE English Studies’ List of Prescribed Texts. English in Australia 51(1): 46–52. McPhee H (2001) Other People’s Words: The Rise and Fall of an Accidental Publisher. London: Picador. Moi T (1991) Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. New Literary History 22(4): 1017–1049. Munro C and Sheahan-Bright R (2006) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946–2005. University of Queensland Press. Murray S (2007) Publishing Studies: Critically Mapping Research in Search of a Discipline. Publishing Research Quarterly 22(4): 3–25. Nakamura L (2013) ‘Words With Friends’: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads. PMLA 128(1): 238–243. Nelson C, Treichler P A, and Grossberg L (1992) Cultural Studies: An Introduction. In: Grossberg L, Nelson C and Treichler P A (eds) Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1–23. Neuwirth C (2019) Speculative Archiving of a Potential Future Literary Award: Embedded Publishing Studies Research. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2013) Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Structural Reform in the Newspaper Industry on the Marketing of Books. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book: Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 29–39. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2019) The Shrinking of Fairfax Media’s Books Pages: A Microstudy of Digital Disruption. Australian Journalism Review 41 (1): 17–35. Ray Murray P and Squires C (2013) The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit. Book 2.0 3(1): 3–24. Romei S (2014) Sonya Hartnett on Children, Golden Boys, and The Stella Prize—And Animals. The Australian, 16 August. Russ J (1983) How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sapiro G (2016) The Metamorphosis of the Modes of Consecration in the Literary Field: Academies, Literary Prizes, Festivals. Poetics 59: 5–19. Schiffrin A (2000) The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso. Sheridan S (2011) Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

2

POWER AND PRESTIGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY FIELD

39

Smith Maguire J and Matthews J (2012) Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now? An Introduction to Cultural Intermediaries in Context. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5): 551–562. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Squires C (2007) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Starke R (2006) Case-Study: Festival Big Top. In: Munro C and Sheehan-Bright R (eds) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 156–159. Stella Schools (2020) About Stella Schools. Available at: https://thestellaprize. com.au/schools/. Accessed 26 June 2020. Stevens I (2004) A Short History of the Literature Board, 1986–2000. Surry Hills: Australia Council. Stevenson D (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Stinson E (2016a) Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption. Australian Humanities Review 59: 23–43. Stinson E (2016b) Small Publishers and the Miles Franklin Award. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 137–149. Thompson F (2006) Sixties Larrikins. In: Munro C and Sheahan-Bright R (eds) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 31–50. Thompson J (2012) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the TwentyFirst Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson J B (2010) Merchants of Culture. London: Polity. Verboord M (2003) Classification of Authors by Literary Prestige. Poetics 23: 259–281. Verdaasdonk H (1983) Social and Economic Factors in the Attribution of Literary Quality. Poetics 12: 383–395. Wacquant L (2016) A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus. The Sociological Review 64: 64–72. Weber M (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yiannakis J (2014) Tallying a Possible Literary Canon in Upper School English Literature as Evidenced in Various Australian States, 1945–2005. Issues in Education Research 24(1): 98–113. Zangen B (2003) Women as Readers, Writers and Judges: Controversy About the Orange Prize for Fiction. Women’s Studies 32: 281–299. Zwar J (2012) What Were We Buying? Non-Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction Sales Patterns in Australia in the 2000s. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: JASAL 12(23): 1–27.

CHAPTER 3

The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews

Contemporary literary journalism—the book pages of the major daily newspapers and literary magazines—acts as an arbiter of literary tastes, assuming the authority to influence what is considered culturally valuable or legitimate: ‘reviewers play an important role in setting the agenda in terms of the way an individual text is engaged with and understood’ (Harvey and Lamond 2016: 87). Literary editors of some of Australia’s most respected reviewing publications have observed that beyond promoting a new title to the reading public, book reviews encourage literary discourse, influence and reflect cultural appreciation and contribute to the standing of authors within the literary field (see Colmer 1971; Knox 2009; Palattella 2010). Book reviews have a dual framing function in the literary field in that they simultaneously promote a new title and author to readers, and, through the act of reviewing, identify the text and author as worthy of discussion (Squires 2020: 118). This dual function, a common characteristic among agents of consecration, has established book reviewers and reviewing publications as long-standing powerful intermediaries in the literary field. The influence of the book review may in some ways appear relatively minor in the grand scheme of a literary career, however, such is the power of a book review that without any critical engagement in the major newspapers or cultural magazines, attention from other consecratory institutions becomes difficult. The book review, therefore, is often regarded as © The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_3

41

42

A. DANE

the ‘one of the early points of (potential) canon formation’ (Squires 2020: 121). And, as I explore further in this chapter and in Chapter 5, increasingly book reviews act as a necessary gateway for access to the literary festival stage and beyond. Book reviews are used – and indeed written – by the people who sit on prize committees, program literary festivals … and commission for publication. These are activities that have an impact on sales and also promulgate literary value. (Harvey and Lamond 2016: 87)

The close ties between agents of consecration within the literary field mean that biased practices enacted within one sector is likely to compound in another, and the entrenched attitudes around gender, literary expression and legitimacy that underpin and inform actions within the Australian literary field ensure that the field remains unchanged and women remain under-represented in the pages of the major book reviewing publications. This chapter develops an understanding of the space between what book reviewers and literary editors presume to be the current—and historical—representation of women in book reviews, and the realities of the representation of women authors and women reviewers within book reviewing publications. I bring together longitudinal descriptive demographic data from 50 years of book reviews in three publications, and personal accounts of reviewing practice from publication editors and reviewers, to establish a fulsome account of the gender gap in this most vital tastemaking institution. What emerges from this analysis is the continual under-representation of women authors in popular sites of book reviewing, despite the continual perception by reviewers and literary editors that the gender gap is closing. What also becomes clear from this analysis is that there is a group of ‘must review’ authors: those whom the literary editors see as the authors that reviewers must engage with. For some literary editors, these are the books and authors that their readers expect to see when they open the weekend paper. For others, they are the authors with whom the newspapers and magazines are keen to exchange symbolic capital. It is the identification of this group that allows us to see the rigidity of the structure of the literary field and the ways in which the building of literary prestige is constant and generative process supported by agents such as book reviewers and literary editors. The longitudinal nature of this study allows us to see this practice in action.

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

43

Contemporary Book Reviewing Practice Book reviews are concerned with what’s new. In some respects, book reviews in Australia’s daily newspapers and cultural magazines could be seen as the barometer of Australian literary culture: giving insights into the state of the field, and what to expect from the national literary discourse in the coming months. Examining the relationship between book reviews and gender—that is, who is reviewing and who is being reviewed—over half a century allows us to see the ways in which the nature of this relationship has changed over time. Book reviews are, however, in a somewhat atypical position in the contemporary field. Unlike literary prizes and literary festivals, which continue to grow in both number and in influence, the book review pages of the weekend newspapers and the print editions of cultural magazines like Australian Book Review (ABR) are in decline (Nolan and Ricketson 2019). Commentary on the declining print newspaper industry in many national contexts abounds, and this commentary often comes with an assertion of the declining influence of the traditional print book review. Speaking with authors, publicists, literary agents and publishers from the Australian literary field supports the idea that the influence of the book review pages is perhaps waning, however, my analysis of interacting consecratory institutions reveals that this is not necessarily the case. While the number of reviews published in ABR and The Australian every year is decreasing, the influence wielded by these two stalwarts of Australian book criticism remains. Reviewers have the power to ascribe value to a title, establishing it as an object that is worthy of legitimate discourse, in turn making a vital contribution to the process of literary consecration (Bourdieu 1993). Reviewers and critics within the field to contribute to the perception of a text, and a book review in a major newspaper or literary magazine has the power to influence the field’s ‘conception of what it is to be considered as important’ (Van Rees 1983: 398), giving book reviewers and literary editors the ability to exert considerable influence over the nature of the habitus of individuals in the literary field and, therefore, influence over the field-wide perceptions of gender, power and legitimacy. In more concrete terms, when a title is reviewed in a newspaper, its chances of being engaged with by essayists in cultural journals, and eventually critics within the academy,

44

A. DANE

are greatly enhanced (Van Rees 1983). Writing on the role and legitimacy of book critics in the contemporary post-digital literary field, Marc Verboord perhaps best articulates the radiating influence of book reviews in the contemporary field: Critics are among the institutional actors such as scholars, patrons and producers who decide what products should be considered aesthetically valuable and subsequently worthy of analysing, subsidising and honouring in the field of arts and culture. (Verboord 2009: 625)

It is the act of identification, of selection, that elevates a book and an author so that they might be more visible among the 20,000-odd new titles published in a given year (Books + Publishing, 2016; Books + Publishing, 2019). The symbolic capital attached to a book review is not necessarily predicated on the content of the review but rather its mere existence. Moreover, reviews are vital for the development of an author’s public profile, and it is emerging writers in particular who rely on the ‘legitimation’ that a review brings (Nolan and Ricketson 2013). With so few books chosen by literary editors for review, it could be argued that only ‘good books’, or books that are considered worthy of discussion, are reviewed. In their study of the representation of women in British book review pages Cooter et al. (1987: 49) note that book review pages are highly selective, and yet once selection has been made, readers have effectively been told, of all the books published this week/month, these are the most worthy of consideration.

While the process of putting together the book review pages in newspapers and literary magazines varies from publication to publication, most commonly it is the literary editor who matches text with reviewer (Cooter et al. 1987; Romei 2016). Conversations with the literary editors at ABR and The Australian, and the former literary editor of Sydney Morning Herald, revealed that the process of putting together the book review pages is fairly consistent across the three publications: reviews are sent to the editors of publications or literary sections, most commonly by the book publishing house’s publicity staff. Former Sydney Morning Herald literary editor Susan Wyndham estimates that during her tenure at the newspaper—from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2008 to 2017—she would receive between 80 and 100 books a week from publishers, from which

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

45

she would select those that would be reviewed, often between seven and 15 titles. Speaking with me about this process, Wyndham (2018) recalled: They [the books] came in every day and I would look for the important books that leapt out at me, and then the hardest part in that process was going through every book—and I would look at everything at least briefly—and deciding what might be interesting for our readers, who were of course a mainstream and widely spread group. That could be really difficult, and it became more and more difficult as the space reduced and, I think, the number of books published kept increasing. So, a lot of personal judgement comes into that.

Once the titles for review are chosen, they are then matched with a reviewer, and while commissioning reviews still remains the dominant practice in Australian reviewing publications, some editors and reviewers report that the practice of freelance reviewers ‘pitching reviews’ is increasingly common. The criteria for this matching usually rests upon expertise: for example, a sports biography will more often than not be reviewed by a sportswriter or someone similar, and a work of poetry will often be reviewed by a poet or literary scholar. The Australian’s literary editor Stephen Romei (2016) reports that matching a title to a reviewer, and even the selection of titles to review, can be a collaborative process between the literary editor and the reviewers, making the book reviews section of the newspaper a tightly curated space. However, speaking with Susan Wyndham, Stephen Romei and Peter Rose revealed that the practice of freelance reviewers ‘pitching’ reviews of books to magazine and newspapers is increasingly common. The process of putting together the book review section of major newspapers and cultural magazines places a lot of power in the hands of the literary editors in terms of the titles that they choose to be reviewed, the reviewers they select and the pitches they commission. Therefore, when assessing the existence of gender bias and the under-representation of women authors and women reviewers in these book reviewing pages, the significance of the decisions that literary editors make should be of primary concern (Cooter et al. 1987). Questions surrounding the relationship between gender and book reviewing practices have long plagued the Anglophone publishing field. Margaret Cooter et al. (1987), Dale Spender (1989), Marilyn French (in Spender 1989), Katherine Bode (2008), and Melinda Harvey and

46

A. DANE

Julieanne Lamond (2016) have all found the existence of a gender gap in the book reviews of a number of major reviewing publications. Perhaps the impetus for this scholarship is best captured by Spender (1989: 61) when she states: ‘Book reviews themselves throw up some of the most central and stimulating issues around the significance of sexism, and the maintenance of male authority in the literature of western society’. The 1980s were a period when the gender gap in book reviews caught the attention of a number of women in the publishing industry, and counting became the preferred method to illustrate, and presumably rectify, this gap. Veronica Sullivan, former Stella Prize Manager—an organisation that, since 2012, also conducts an annual survey assessing the gender gap in Australian book reviewing—articulated why quantitative research approaches have long been a popular approach to identifying the gender reviewing gap: I think that it is really important to be equipped with the figures and the numbers to support us, because it is a really quick and easy visual way of putting it into people’s faces and saying, ‘This is what is actually happening.’ Because you can kind of talk about the feeling of powerlessness and talk about the feeling that women are under-represented, but if you don’t have any evidence for it, it is hard to make a case to change people’s minds who aren’t already on board.

In 1985, Cooter et al. (1987) undertook an extensive study of 18 American reviewing publications, ranging from women’s literary journals such as Spare Rib to daily newspapers like The New York Times. This research found that women were less likely to review or to be reviewed in all publications—representation of women was typically 30% or lower—other than those targeted specifically to women. And when the literary editors of the publications, especially those that disproportionally review books written by men, were shown the results of the count, the researchers were often met with complacency or denial. Cooter et al. (1987) write: Despite their blatant discrimination against women, most of the editorial staff we talked to were supremely complacent, shrugging off our questions and claiming that there was no bias in their choice of books for review or of the reviewer.

This response from literary editors has become a common theme in subsequent research. Dale Spender (1989) undertook a gender count of the

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

47

reviews in a number of UK publications. Spender, who measured the column inches dedicated to reviews of books by women and reviews of books by men, found that in 1984, reviews of books by women took up around 20% of the available space on the page. And, like Cooter et al. (1987), the literary editors of the sample publications responded to Spender’s data with confusion, complacency and denial, saying that there was no bias; some even went so far as to say that women received more critical attention than men. In her book—with the tongue-in-cheek title The Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good (1989)—Spender also details an unpublished study of reviews and essays in The New York Times Book Review, conducted by American author Marilyn French. French counted the number of reviews, the gender of the authors, the gender of the reviewers, and the gender of the essayists over a period of seven weeks in 1985 and found that 86% of reviews were of titles written by men, men were the majority of reviewers and men wrote the majority of review essays. In response to French’s data, the literary editors stated that they would be interested in improving the representation of women in the publication, but there were not enough women reviewers, women essayists or women authors who met the standards set by the publication (Spender 1989). French’s findings launched a campaign to encourage women authors to pitch essays and reviews to The New York Times Book Review to increase the representation of women within the publication’s pages. For a brief time in 1985—around three months—this campaign was successful and there was an increase in the number of women writing for and being reviewed in The New York Times Book Review; however, the change did not last. Spender (1989) writes: While the women were able to keep up the pressure they could influence the outcome, to some extent, but as soon as the pressure was decreased— so too was the representation of women. With no built-in mechanism of accountability, no guaranteed form of redress or right of reply, it can be ‘back to normal’ again once the abnormal emphasis on the position of women no longer applies.

That the review pages return to the status quo—where the majority of the review pages are written by men, or dedicated to books written by men—speaks to the difficulties of transforming the habitus of the field (Bourdieu’s 1993, 1996). The underlying dispositions of the individuals

48

A. DANE

in the field, and not just the manifestation of these dispositions, require sustained attention in order to disrupt the long-established systems of symbolic capital acquisition. From the late 1980s until well into the twenty-first century, the scholarly attention paid to the relationship between gender and book reviewing in the Anglophone literary sphere appears to have waned. However, in 2009 VIDA: Women in Literary Arts launched the VIDA Count, a project that aims to, ‘highlight gender imbalances by tallying genre, book reviewers, books reviewed, and journalistic bylines of offer an accurate assessment of the publishing world’ (VIDA 2019). Taking a similar approach to the investigations that came before it, the annual VIDA count highlights the gender reviewing gap in over 35 publications. Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond’s 2016 study of book reviews in Australian Book Review (ABR) and The Australian, together with the launch of the Stella Count in 2013, has reignited the debate around the critical reception of women’s writing in Australia. Harvey and Lamond’s count of reviews, investigating the gender disparity in book reviewing in the years 1985 and 2013, showed that women continue to be underrepresented in book review pages as both reviewers and authors being reviewed. Meanwhile, Katherine Bode and Tara Murphy (2014) arrived at similar conclusions to Harvey and Lamond (2016), Spender (1989), and Cooter et al. (1987), albeit by following different methods, using data extracted from the AustLit database to track the writing about novels in the Australian literary field. Broadly speaking, all these studies identified a gender gap in book reviews and critical writing about women. Book Reviewing in Australia The 1960s brought with it a new era of book reviewing in Australia; both ABR and The Australian were first published in the early 1960s, joining The Age to establish a lively and fertile book reviewing sector (Harvey and Lamond 2016; McLaren 1981). The Australian and The Age (along with fellow Nine newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald) have maintained this reputation and continue to be regarded as influential and necessary spaces for the discussion of books and authors. Established in 1961, ABR describes itself as ‘one of Australia’s leading cultural magazines’ (ABR 2016). It has a circulation of approximately 16,000 per issue (ABR 2016), of which there are currently ten issues per year, but at times this has dropped to four per year. The content of the magazine is primarily

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

49

focused on Australian titles. Author Helen Garner described the magazine thus: ‘In one elegant, authoritative hit, ABR shows you what’s going on around here’ (ABR 2016). In describing ABR, editor Peter Rose said: I hope it’s distinctive. I mean, all magazines aspire to be different from their main rivals. I certainly hope it has a reputation for rigour, for independence, for responsible aesthetic responses to books.

Rose’s description of the magazine positions it as a publication firmly entrenched in the literary field. While ABR does not have a particularly large readership, Rose sees the magazine as occupying a prestigious and symbolically significant place in the field. The Age has been in circulation in Melbourne since 1854 and for the majority of this study’s sample period was owned by Fairfax Media (prior to 1972, The Age was owned by the Syme family).1 Since 1965, book reviews in The Age have appeared in a number of sections within the weekend papers and now form part of Saturday’s Spectrum supplement. According to Roy Morgan Research (2018), the average readership for The Age on Saturday from the years 2010 to 2017 was 706,625. Readership declined across that period: in 2010 The Age’s Saturday readership was reported as 858,000, dropping to 588,000 in 2015 before increasing to 627,000 in 2017 (Roy Morgan Research 2018). Similarly to The Australian, book reviews in this newspaper consist of titles from Australia and from overseas. The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, was established in 1964 and was Australia’s first daily national newspaper. Between 2010 and 2017 the weekend edition of The Australian had an average readership of around 823,571 (Roy Morgan Research 2018). Like The Age, The Australian’s readership is in decline, dropping from 887,000 in 2010 to 629,000 in 2017. In addition to the reviews in the weekend edition of the paper, from 1996 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2011 The Australian published a literary supplement, which was primarily made up of book reviews and critical essays. The Australian reviews both Australian and international titles. Describing the most sought-after reviewing publications, literary publicist Alice Lewinsky (2016) notes that 1 On 26 July 2018 Fairfax Media’s CEO, Greg Hywood, announced that Fairfax Media would be merging with Nine Entertainment Co and the merged company would be called Nine.

50

A. DANE

‘a large review in The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian is great’. ABR, The Australian and The Age are all established authorities in the Australian literary field and, therefore, are interesting sites of analysis when trying to understand the gender gap in both reviewing, and more broadly in the pursuit of prestige in the literary field. Questions around the long-term viability of Australian book reviewing practice pervades discussions about book reviews and book reviewing in Australia. Concerns over the financial health of the newspaper industry (Nolan and Ricketson 2013), coupled with the near-constant scholarly attention paid to the critical approach taken by many reviewers (Allington 2016; Goldsworthy 2013; Stinson 2016a, b) underpin predictions of the ‘death’ of book reviewing as it is currently understood. Kerryn Goldsworthy (2013) addressed what she termed the ‘decline polemic’ of the Australian reviewing field and found that, contrary to popular belief, the book reviewing culture in Australia is strong. And, although the number of titles being reviewed by the major publications is in decline, new publication such as the born-digital Sydney Review of Books, are filling the gap. Goldsworthy’s research highlights the enduring importance of book reviews in Australia’s literary field, despite the constant, and perhaps increased, fear that the practice is in decline. The analysis presented in this chapter gives a historical perspective in order to understand the reasons why the gender gap in book reviews, as presented by the Stella Count (Stella Prize 2018a, b) and by research conducted by Harvey and Lamond (2016) and others is proving so difficult to close. I argue that it is not just disparity between the men and women authors that requires both scholarly and industry attention, but also the gender disparity of the reviewers at each publication, and which reviewers review which books or authors. This gives rise to questions around what appropriate representation might be. Does the fact that, since 2005, women have consistently published the majority of literary titles mean that if women make up 50% of authors reviewed it is not true parity? For now, seeing as women rarely constitute more than 35% of authors reviewed, setting the bar at 50% seems like a figure against which we can measure progress.

Notes on Method Descriptive demographic data was collected from book reviews in The Age and The Australian from the years 1965 to 2015. The same demographic

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

51

data was extracted from ABR for the years 1965 to 1973 and 1978– 2015 as the magazine was not published in the years 1974–1977. The year, name and gender of the reviewer, name and gender of the author reviewed, whether or not the reviewed author is a First Nations Australian and the title, genre and publisher of the reviewed work were collected from the three publications, establishing a dataset with 74,266 reviews and 668,394 data points. Where Harvey and Lamond (2016) and Cooter et al. (1987) noted the size and position reviews occupied on the page—allowing them to analyse the intersection of gender and review prominence—I decided against this approach. Due to the fact that this study crosses a number of decades and three publications, it was difficult to establish a common metric to classify small or large reviews. Over the course of the sample period, the number, length and style of the reviews changed so it would be difficult to accurately assess the relationship between the prominence of a review and an author’s gender in the three publications over 50 years. Reviews in ABR were accessed from the State Library of Victoria’s archive of the magazine, and reviews in The Age and The Australian were obtained from The University of Melbourne’s microfilm newspaper archive. The gender of the authors and reviewers, particularly in the case of Australian authors, was accessed through the AustLit and BlackWords databases. For authors who were not listed on these databases, gender of the author was most commonly determined through the author’s website or Wikipedia entry. There are some reviewers and authors whose gender could not be identified; while small in number, these were classified a U (for unknown) and removed from the data analysis.

Gender, Book Reviews & Literary Prestige The method I have used to assess the relationship between gender and book reviewing practice does not necessarily provide a complete picture of the way the book review pages are put together at The Age. Since 2012, the practice of copy sharing between the major Nine mastheads—that is The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times —means that the number of book reviews in The Age has not declined in the same way that has been seen with The Australian. On a superficial level, there appears to be just as many opportunities to be reviewed in The Age as there were in the early 2000s when Australia was in the midst of the mineral boom and the rise of digital media had not yet undone the print

52

A. DANE

industry’s financially reliable advertising business model. However, while the number of book reviews in The Age has not decreased in the way that it has in other publications, research by Nolan and Ricketson (2013, 2019), and discussions with former Sydney Morning Herald literary editor Susan Wyndham, indicate that the number of books being reviewed across the Nine publications as a whole has shrunk. Where prior to 2012 separate reviews of the same book were often commissioned by The Age, Sydney Morning Herald or The Canberra Times , now, due to the practice of copy sharing, only one review will be commissioned. If an author fails to be reviewed in one of these publications, content syndication practices eliminate the opportunity to be reviewed in another. The net result is that, across all three publications, the opportunity for review is in decline. In an essay published in Meanjin entitled, ‘The Last Literary Editor’, Susan Wyndham (2017: n.p.) recounts her final few years as the Sydney Morning Herald literary editor, a period that saw the introduction of copy sharing between the Nine publications. Wyndham recalls conversations with The Age’s books editor Jason Steger and the papers’ editors, where the ‘higher-ups’ argued that books could be ‘a subject that could be covered nationally … since the same books are published and read all over Australia’. Wyndham’s response to this was that: Sydney and Melbourne readers—of books and newspapers—had different interests and tastes; that there were local authors, books, issues and events that were relevant in one or other market.

Wyndham’s recollection of this period highlights the homogenisation that follows the syndication of literary coverage, and how limiting this practice can be. Research by Nolan and Ricketson (2019) details the shifting reviewing practice across the Nine mastheads and found that not only had there been a decline in the number of pages dedicated to book reviewing in The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times from 2013 to 2017, but also copy sharing had become standard practice, resulting in ‘the diminishing diversity of the range of books reviewed, but also the range of perspectives offered’. In addition, Nolan and Ricketson spoke with literary editors and marketing executives at Nine to contextualise their quantitative data and found that reviewing practice at the major dailies had been ‘significantly affected by changes and consolidations’ and the ‘uncertain conditions’ that have, in part, contributed to this decline in the multiplicity in the reviewers and the titles and authors reviewed at

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

53

the Nine mastheads. And while the syndication of reviews across the Nine dailies may be a unique practice among Australian newspapers, the representation of authors and reviewers from traditionally marginalised groups across the Anglophone literary field does not appear to be growing. The decline in the number of reviews over the past decade in ABR and The Australian, and the copy sharing practices employed by The Age, mean that there are fewer positions available for authors and reviewers, which might explain why growth in the proportion of women reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian has slowed. And while the number of titles reviewed each year in The Age has remained consistent since around 2012 when the practice of copy sharing began, Nolan and Ricketson (2019) suggest that, among the Nine mastheads, the culture of uncertainty that surrounds this practice contributes to the widespread sentiment that the space for book reviews is under threat, contributing to a retreat to the comfortable status quo in which reviews of titles written by men dominate the page. The relationship between gender and the book reviewing practices in three of Australia’s most prominent book reviewing publications has changed over the 1965–2015 period, but not significantly. And while this relationship differs from publication to publication, and from genre to genre, it is clear from this analysis that women authors are at a disadvantage when it comes to the symbolic capital acquired from critical engagement between their titles and reviewers (Fig. 3.1). Anecdotally, Publisher Michael Heyward (2017) notes: Reviews are very important and reviews are under challenge right now, and with the collapse of traditional legacy media, there are fewer and fewer column inches and fewer pages available for book reviews.

Describing the influential role of the habitus within the field of cultural production, Bourdieu (1993: 84) observes that while dispositions are prone to evolving and progressing in line with broader social changes, such as the changing position of women within a given field, when the number of positions of power are under threat—threats like the cutting of pages dedicated to book reviews—the field will often revert to a more conservative structure where the dominant members of the dominant classes occupy a greater proportion of available positions. This tightening of the field, this reigning in of progress, can be seen in the stagnant nature of the relationship between book reviewing and gender. Despite this

54

A. DANE

Fig. 3.1 Number of book reviews per year: ABR, The Age, The Australian, 1965–2015

contemporary stagnation, there has been an incremental shift in representation of women in book reviews and, broadly speaking, in the 50 years between 1965 and 2015, there has been growth in the proportion of women reviewers in the ABR, The Age and The Australian. Similarly, there has been an increase in the proportion of books written by women that were reviewed in the pages of these publications. The participation of women in the publishing industry as a whole grew throughout the period studied (see, for example, Couper 2016), as did the proportion of books published in Australia written by women (AustLit Database 2017a, b). One might expect that growth in the representation of women as published authors and in the publishing industry more broadly would lead not only to more women being reviewed, but

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

55

also to growth in the representation of women among other consecratory institutions, such as literary festivals and literary prizes. The reality is that women rarely have equal access to the symbolic capital associated with being reviewed, and there has been little meaningful growth in the representation of women in book reviewing publications. And, much like Harvey and Lamond (2016: 94) who found a ‘continuity in the relative lack of interest in books by women’ in The Australian and ABR in both 1985 and 2013, the consistent narrative that emerges from this study of book reviewing practice is an apparent lack of commitment to closing the gender review gap. In the 20 years to 2015, there has not been significant growth in the proportion of women-authored books reviewed across the three publications, although in the representation of women authors The Age at least has experienced some modest growth during this period, perhaps explained by the fact that there has not been a significant cut to the number of reviews published annually since the introduction of syndication in 2012. Of the three publications studied, ABR consistently reviews the highest proportion of books written by women, however, like The Australian, progress has stagnated and the proportion of reviews of books by women in ABR has not changed over the three decades to 2015. Moreover, while there is typically a higher proportion of women reviewers than women authors reviewed in each publication, the proportion of women reviewers at ABR, The Age and The Australian has weakened across the twenty-first century (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). In all three publications, there was a decline in the proportion of women reviewers from 1996–2005 to 2006–2015: from 43 to 38% in ABR; from 52 to 43% in The Age and from 35 to 28% in The Australian. This suggests that there could be a connection—of varying strengths from publication to publication—between the proportion of women reviewers and the proportion of women authors reviewed; however, this is not the only factor in play when it comes to the access women authors have to the symbolic capital associated with book reviews. The decline in the proportion of women reviewers also coincides with the drop in the proportion of books reviewed in ABR and The Australian, and the introduction of copy sharing practices among Nine mastheads, of which The Age is part (Nolan and Ricketson 2013). This suggests that the changing economic conditions of Australia’s newspapers influenced not only the number of books reviewed but also the proportion of women reviewing books, aligning with the notion that the field retracts during periods of uncertainty.

Fig. 3.2 Proportion of male versus women authors reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

56 A. DANE

Fig. 3.3 Proportion of male versus women reviewers in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

3 THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

57

58

A. DANE

And while the number of reviews published in The Age did not drop in the same way that it did in the other two publications, there is still a strong culture of uncertainty at all Australian print newspapers: a culture that intersects with the habitus of individuals in the field and the ‘closely guarded’ structure of the hierarchies. It cannot be overlooked that the literary editors at The Age and The Australian and the editor of ABR all white, male and middle-aged: Peter Rose became the editor of ABR in 2001, Jason Steger was appointed books editor of The Age in 2000 and Stephen Romei took over as literary editor at The Australian in 2006. And while being white, male and middle-aged does not preclude someone from curating inclusive book reviews, in the case of ABR, The Age and The Australian the literary dispositions of these editors might not regard inclusivity as a priority. The under-representation of women within the book review pages in Australian publications is not unique to the Australian context. VIDA’s annual survey reveals a similar gender reviewing gap among US- and UK-based book reviewing publications. Other than Boston Review in 2011 and 2015 and The New Republic in 2015, women authors are never equally represented in the 10 publications studied. Moreover, while women reviewers are commonly in the majority in a number of these publications, an increase in the proportion of women reviewers does not appear to have any meaningful connection to the proportion of books written by women reviewed (Fig. 3.4). VIDA’s research, together with the studies conducted by Marylin French, Dale Spender and the Women in Publishing collective in the 1980s, illustrates the transnational nature of the gendered structure of the literary field. The exclusion of non-white male authors from the

Fig. 3.4 Proportion of male versus women reviewers and authors in US and UK publications, 2010–2015 (Source VIDA Women in the Literary Arts 2019)

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

59

book review pages is the primary step in the exclusion of non-white male authors from the institutions of prestige that help to support literary careers and build literary canons. The habitus of individuals in the Australian literary field exist within and are influenced by a broader Anglophone context, and the practice of limiting access to the symbolic capital from agents of consecration to women authors, authors of colour, disabled authors and working-class authors is not limited to institutions in the Australian field. Reviews of Fiction Titles Dividing this book reviews data into different categories reveals a more complex picture of the overall relationship between gender and book reviewing practices in ABR, The Age and The Australian. Analysis of the fiction titles reviewed over 50 years in the three publication shows that women authors are more highly represented when it comes to reviewing fiction titles, compared with non-fiction and poetry titles. Across the sample period, there were six years in the ABR when the majority of fiction titles reviewed were written by women—1987, 1996, 2001, 2005, 2011 and 2013—and 15 years when the majority of the reviewers of fiction were women. And while there are no instances when reviews of fiction titles written by women constituted the majority of fiction reviews in The Age or The Australian, both publications have a high proportion of women reviewing fiction titles; women reviewed the majority of fiction titles in The Age in seven years of the sample, and 15 years in The Australian. This points to some correlation between the proportion of women reviewers and the proportion of women reviewed. However, despite the strong representation of women in fiction reviews, again progress towards parity with men appears to be slowing as the proportion of reviewed fiction titles written by women falls short of the overall proportion of fiction titles written by women in Australia (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6). Where the proportion of women reviewing fiction in ABR has remained consistently high throughout the decades, only in the decade 2006–2015 did fiction titles written by women make up half of the fiction reviews. Furthermore, growth in the proportion of reviews of fiction titles by women slowed into the latter part of the period studied, increasing just 4 percentage points across two decades. Data collected from The Age shows a similar pattern: the proportion of fiction titles

Fig. 3.5 Proportion of male versus women-authored fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

60 A. DANE

Fig. 3.6 Proportion of male versus women reviewers of fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

3 THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

61

62

A. DANE

written by women also only grew by around 5 percentage points from the 1996–2005 to 2006–2015 period, despite high numbers of women reviewers. In The Australian, there was a decline in both the proportion of women fiction authors reviewed and the proportion of women reviewing fiction titles from 1996–2005 to 2006–2015. Despite the fact that women are more highly represented in the reviews of fiction titles as both authors and reviewers, this analysis again shows that women struggle to gain lasting equal access to the symbolic capital associated with book reviewing, disproportionately so considering the proportion of fiction titles written by women in Australia. However, that the vast majority of critical engagement with women authors occurs with regard to works of fiction; when it comes to book reviewing, fiction—compared with non-fiction and poetry—is the sector where women authors appear to have the strongest representation. Reviews of Non-fiction Titles It is with reviews of non-fiction titles where the correlation between the proportion of women reviewers and the proportion of women authors reviewed appears strongest. In the ABR, in the years 1986, 1999, 2001 and 2010, a decrease in the proportion of women reviewers coincided with a decrease in the proportion of non-fiction titles written by women that were reviewed. Similarly, sharp increase throughout the 50year period in the proportion of women reviewers—such as in 1989 or in 1994—corresponded with an increase in the proportion of women reviewed. A similar pattern can be seen in reviews in The Australian where, in the majority of years across the period, the proportion of women reviewing non-fiction titles and the proportion of non-fiction women authors reviewed represented less than 25%. The correlation between women reviewers and women authors reviewed in The Age is not as strong as that in ABR or The Australian, although there are a number of short periods throughout the 50-year sample when a sharp decrease in the proportion of women reviewers of non-fiction titles corresponded with a dip in the proportion of non-fiction women authors reviewed (Figs. 3.7 and 3.8). What also emerges from this analysis is just how few non-fiction titles written by women are reviewed in all three publications, especially when compared to the reviews of fiction titles. However, despite the low representation of women authors among reviews of non-fiction, there is a

Fig. 3.7 Proportion of male versus women-authored non-fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

3 THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

63

Fig. 3.8 Proportion of male versus women reviewers of non-fiction titles in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965– 2015

64 A. DANE

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

65

similarity in the rate of growth in the proportion of women authors being reviewed across both fiction and non-fiction. For example, the proportion of fiction titles reviewed in The Age written by women went from 22% in the decade 1965–1975 to 45% in the decade 2006–2015: an increase in proportion of 23 percentage points. Similarly, the proportion of non-fiction titles written by women reviewed in The Age increased by 18 percentage points across the period, going from 12% in the decade 1965–1975 to 30% in the decade 2006–2015. Moreover, the changing pace of growth is also consistent across reviews of fiction and non-fiction titles. Growth in the proportion of reviews of non-fiction titles written by women was sharper in the early part of the sample period and slowed into the latter: a recurring pattern that suggests there is a ceiling—possibly of around 45% for all title and even lower when it comes to non-fiction titles—for the proportion of books written by women being reviewed in Australia’s major daily newspapers. The 2016 Women for Media Report (Mullins 2016) presented an analysis of over 6000 news articles across six prominent Australian newspapers in February 2016 to count the number of men and women journalists represented as authors of commentary, editorial and op-ed pieces, and the number of men and women expert sources cited in news stories. The report found that women constituted just 21% of the quoted expert sources, 17% of the writers of commentary, 34% of the writers of editorials and 28% of op-ed contributors (Mullins 2016), consistent with the proportion of reviews of non-fiction titles written by women in ABR, The Age and The Australian. This data raises questions around broader perceptions of the expertise of women in the Australian mediascape, as well as the limited access women have to the spaces that influence opinion. Connections can be drawn between the 2016 Women in Media Report and this analysis of 50 years of non-fiction book reviews. Unlike fiction or poetry, non-fiction titles are often the explicit expression of knowledge production and an author’s non-artistic expertise. The realities of the Australian literary field are such the space to engage with the authority of women is unlikely to exceed 30% of the critical attention available. Reviews of Poetry Titles In all three publications, there were 23 years when there were no women reviewing poetry, seven years when there was no poetry by women reviewed and a number of years when these two instances coincided:

66

A. DANE

1969, 1970, 1972, 1973 and 1976. The multiple, and often consecutive, years when there were no women reviewing poetry in ABR, The Age and The Australian—or in all three in 1969 and 1972—again raises questions around the perceived expertise of women in the literary field. Seen by Bourdieu (1993: 51) as the most autonomous literary expression, poetry occupies a particular place of prestige within the literary field. Especially when it comes to The Australian, it is clear that women were consistently overlooked as reviewers with the expertise to critique the work of Margaret Scott, Dorothy Hewett, M T C Cronin, Judith Beveridge or Jennifer Harrison, all poets whose work was reviewed by men in The Australian across the 50 years to 2015. Growth in the proportion of reviews of poetry written by women has not been strong over the past 20–30 years. From the mid-1970s in the ABR, there was a decline in the proportion of women reviewing poetry, a trend not seen in other genres or at other publications studied. While there was a significant growth of around 37 percentage points in the proportion of women reviewing works of poetry in ABR from the period 1965–1975 to 1976–1985, this did not appear to have a similarly profound effect on the proportion of women-authored poetry reviewed. The significant increase in the reviewing of poetry written by women came in the period 1976–1985, when there was a growth of 9 percentage points from the preceding decade, despite fewer women reviewing in the genre. Similarly, the significant increase in the proportion of women reviewing poetry at The Age in the decade 1996–2005 did little to encourage more works of poetry by women to be reviewed in the same period. On the whole, the pattern of growth in the representation of women authors continues into poetry reviews; growth in the proportion of women poets reviewed across the three publications is small and reached a high of 34% in the ABR for the period 1996–2005. The low levels of representation of women in poetry reviews again highlight the limited access that women authors have to the symbolic capital attached to book reviews; however, this limited access is indeed more pronounced when it comes to poetry reviews in The Age and The Australian. The Most Reviewed Authors If an author acquires symbolic capital by being reviewed in a prominent publication, and accumulated symbolic capital identifies an author as an important subject of criticism and discourse, looking at the most

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

67

reviewed authors per decade could indicate which authors occupy prestigious positions in the literary field. Examining the most reviewed authors in each publication for each decade supports this notion; the top three most reviewed authors for each period are highly recognisable names in the Australian and broader Anglophone publishing field (Table 3.1). In each decade, there is a small handful of authors who are consistently reviewed across all three of the publications, indicating that in each period there is a common group of authors with accumulated symbolic capital whose work reviewers and literary editors regard as consistently warranting critical attention. The existence of such a group only serves to illustrate both the power and the exclusionary nature of book reviewing practice. What this analysis also reveals is that, when it comes to the authors to whom they dedicate the most reviews, ABR and The Age appear to place a greater emphasis on works by Australian authors and The Table 3.1 The most reviewed authors per decade, per publication Decade

ABR

The Age

The Australian

1965–1975

Geoffrey Dutton (6) Hal Porter (6) Rodney Hall (6) Thomas Keneally (6) Elizabeth Jolley (9) David Malouf (8) Geoffrey Blainey (7) Geoffrey Dutton (7)

Hal Porter (9) Iris Murdoch (8) Thomas Keneally (8)

Iris Murdoch (11) Kingsley Amis (11) Martin Boyd (10) Norman Mailer (10) Anthony Burgess (8) Barbara Hanrahan (8) Peter Corris (7)

1976–1985

1986–1995

Peter Corris (17) Elizabeth Jolley (9) Kerry Greenwood (9) Thomas Shapcott (9)

1996–2005

Kerry Greenwood (13) John Marsden (12) Catherine Jinks (11) Garry Disher (11) David Malouf (8) John Kinsella (8) Clive James (6) Geoff Page (6) Matthew Condon (6)

2006–2015

Thomas Keneally (9) Morris Lurie (9) Paul Theroux 8) Joyce Carol Oates (8) John Updike (8) David Malouf (8) John Mortimer (13) Thomas Shapcott (12) John Updike (12) Elizabeth Jolley (12) Kerry Greenwood (15) Garry Disher (14) Catherine Jinks (12) Alexander McCall Smith (31) Gideon Haigh (15) Peter Corris (14)

Peter Corris (15) Fay Weldon (9) Geoff Page (8) Marion Halligan (8) Thomas Shapcott (8) Anita Brookner (9) John Updike (9) Paul Theroux (9) David Malouf (13) Janet Frame (10) A C Grayling (9) Margaret Atwood (9) Peter Ackroyd (9)

68

A. DANE

Australian casts a wider net. In the period 1965–1975, Thomas Keneally, Iris Murdoch and Hal Porter were all among the ‘most reviewed’ in more than one publication, and David Malouf was among the most reviewed authors in ABR and The Age in the decade 1975–1985. Australian authors dominated the ‘most reviewed’ list in the period 1986–1995: titles by crime writer Peter Corris, Elizabeth Jolley and Thomas Shapcott were reviewed on more than ten occasions across the three publications in the decade. This perhaps reflects the burgeoning Australian literary field that during the 1980s and early 1990s saw a sharp increase in the number of local independent publishing houses. In the final two decades to 2015, there appears to be a split between reviews in ABR and The Age, and reviews in The Australian. Where ABR and The Age repeatedly engage with the works of Australian authors— among them Kerry Greenwood, Catherine Jinks and Garry Disher—other than David Malouf there are no Australian authors among the ‘most reviewed’ in The Australian in the decades 1996–2005 or 2006–2015; Anita Brookner, John Updike, Janet Frame, Margaret Atwood and A C Grayling are all among the top three most reviewed authors during the period. Elizabeth Jolley, David Malouf and Thomas Keneally are prominent members of Australia’s literary field with significant accumulated symbolic capital, and are all winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, among others. This prominence is a product of sustained critical engagement from powerful, that is symbolically wealthy, members of the literary field through a number of channels, including book reviews. Two of the literary editors I spoke with for this study, The Australian’s Stephen Romei and former literary editor at The Sydney Morning Herald Susan Wyndham, emphasised the particular status some authors held in Australia’s literary culture that meant their work was consistently reviewed: There are some books that you feel you must review if you can because they are by the authors that people know and want to read, so there is some self-perpetuating status in all of that, I guess … Authors like Rodney Hall … Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, Helen Garner … are the authors who have a following and a reputation and, whether it is a good book or a bad book, people want to know about their latest. (Susan Wyndham 2018)

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

69

There are just some writers that have to be reviewed, so that’s easy to do. You have to review Helen Garner; you have to review Tim Winton. (Stephen Romei 2016)

The author Mark Henshaw (2016) named similar authors when he spoke about the most prestigious in the field: there are a couple of people in Australia who have that kind of unquestioned status: the import J M Coetzee has it, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Peter Carey, Tim [Winton].

And while the authors named by Wyndham, Romei and Henshaw don’t regularly appear among the most reviewed across the sample period, these statements do indicate that some authors are regarded by the literary editors as authors who must be reviewed; and as Wyndham notes, this can begin to resemble a self-fulfilling prophecy. This, however, is not a contemporary phenomenon. In his 1971 essay on the state of Australian book criticism published in Meanjin, John Colmer noted that: In the severe competition for space, where only a tenth of the books submitted are reviewed and the ‘discarding process is brutal and arbitrary’, according to one literary editor, old names of yesteryear possess a magic passport to the review column. (349)

However, simply looking at the most reviewed authors for each publication and each decade is not the most reliable method for the exploration of which authors are the most symbolically powerful; this model favours authors who write and publish a large volume of titles, for example, Alexander McCall Smith, whose series The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency consists of 20 titles. Taking the authors whom Wyndham and Romei identified as ‘must reviews’—Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan and Rodney Hall—reveals the way their literary reputations are supported by sustained critical engagement from reviewers in these three publications. It should also not be overlooked that Helen Garner was the only woman cited by Wyndham and Romei as being a ‘must review’. Every novel that Peter Carey, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan and Helen Garner wrote in the sample period was reviewed in at least one of the publications in this sample. The only fiction by Tim Winton not reviewed was his novella Blueback (1997), and for Rodney Hall every novel other than A Place Among the People

70

A. DANE

(1975) was the subject of review. Moreover, a number of non-fiction and, in some cases, poetry titles by these authors were also reviewed across the sample period, especially the work of Helen Garner, who commonly writes both fiction and non-fiction, and David Malouf. And while David Malouf crops up again and again among the ‘most reviewed’, it is clear that just being among the most reviewed is not the only indicator of significant accumulated symbolic capital, and that the ‘most reviewed’ list does not necessarily capture all the authors who were the subject of repeated and sustained critical engagement from reviewers across their career. Being among the ‘most reviewed’ does indicate that reviewers and literary editors see these authors as worthy of repeated critical engagement, but it also corresponds to how often each author publishes a new title. To get a better understanding of the relationship between gender and the most reviewed authors, for each publication I identified the authors and their respective titles that were reviewed five or more times in a given decade. If we assume that repeated engagement and selection by an agent of consecration—in this case, the literary editors and book reviewers— is a signifier of an author’s power in the field, this analysis shows that in every publication, in each decade, men were consistently the majority of ‘most reviewed’ authors and, therefore, more highly valued. Similarly, men wrote the majority of reviews of titles by the most reviewed authors. At the ABR, The Age and The Australian, the decade 1986–1995 had the highest proportion of most reviewed women authors, which again reiterates the slowing progress towards equal representation between men and women in the book review pages, and, in the case of ‘most reviewed authors’, it shows a regression from parity (Fig. 3.9). Access to the positions of power that accompany the continual selection for review by literary editors and book reviewers is unequal and, in all three publications, women authors were much more likely to be reviewed multiple times in the decade 1986–1995 than they were in the ten years to 2015. This lack of access is particularly pronounced at The Australian, a publication widely regarded as the ‘writing and publishing world’s public face’ (Mark Davis quoted in Harvey and Lamond 2016). As opportunities for review diminished into the final decade of the sample period, the proportion of men reviewed again and again in ABR and The Australian increased, suggesting that in uncertain or unstable climates, such as those experienced by the print media sector over the last decade, the actions of

Fig. 3.9 Most reviewed authors per decade in ABR, The Age, The Australian

3 THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

71

72

A. DANE

agents in the literary field respond in a way that the dominant members of the dominant class are protected. Who Reviews What? Women don’t only review books written by women. And while this may seem like an obvious assertion, it does raise the question of the gender breakdown of titles reviewed by men versus the gender breakdown of titles reviewed by women. In other words, who is reviewing what, and what can this tell us about the relationship between gender and book reviewing practice in ABR, The Age and The Australian (Fig. 3.10)? In the majority of years across the 50-year sample period, around 75% of the books reviewed by men in the ABR, and closer to 80% in The Age and The Australian, were written by men. This is particularly problematic in light of the fact that, broadly speaking, men constitute, on average, around 70% of reviewers in each publication. The proportion of titles both written by men and reviewed by men in all three publications remains fairly consistent throughout the period 1965–2015, holding steady despite an increase in the proportion of women reviewers and an increase in the proportion of titles by women authors reviewed, giving a strong indication that men predominantly reviewing books by men. Women reviewers are, on the whole, much more likely than their male counterparts to review a more equal proportion of books written by women and books written by men. Figure 3.9 shows that, for women reviewing books in ABR, The Age and The Australian, there is a clustering of data points around the median, indicating a tendency for women to review books written by both men and women. Breaking the data down into five decades illustrates how little change there has been to the reviewing patterns of men and women over time and again we can see the steadfast nature of reviewing patterns at ABR, The Age and The Australian. Where there has been an increase in the proportion of titles reviewed by men that were written by women, this growth is insignificant; for all three publications it is between nine and 12 percentage points. Similarly, there have not been many changes in the reviewing patterns of women reviewers, especially since 1986. Across all decades and in all three publications, women consistently review a disproportionately high proportion of books written by women, and review a greater mix of authors, a mix that more closely aligns with the overall representation of men and women authors in each publication (Fig. 3.11).

Fig. 3.10 Gender breakdown of authors reviewed by men and authors reviewed by women in ABR, The Age and The Australian, 1965–2015

3 THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

73

Fig. 3.11 Gender breakdown of authors reviewed by men and authors reviewed by women in ABR, The Age and The Australian, per decade

74 A. DANE

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

75

The pattern that emerges from this analysis supports, in part, the misguided notion that men write books for men and women write books for women. Writing on the subject of men and women Australian novelists, their output and their cultural reception, Bode (2012) describes an essentialism in the Australian literary field that divides neatly down gendered lines. However, while the picture is not quite as simple when it comes to book reviews in ABR, The Age and The Australian, it is just as concerning. Where women review books by men and women, men are much more likely to just review books by men. Writing in the London Review of Books about the representation of women in the Irish literary field and the fact that the attention paid to work written by men far outweighed the attention given to women, author Anne Enright (2017) observed that few men were reviewing titles written by women. She writes: This spiral of male affection twists up through our cultural life, lifting male confidence and reputation as it goes. Work by men is also read and discussed by female critics, only one side of the equation is weak: the lack of engagement with women’s work by men.

Although there is a handful of men who do review books by women, it is just a handful: on average between 17 and 20%. Conversely, women review a significant number of books by men. Rather than men exclusively reviewing books by men and women exclusively reviewing books by women—as Bode’s notion of essentialism would suggest—books by women are reviewed by women and books by men are reviewed by both men and women, supporting and possibly perpetuating another widespread notion that books by men are universal and books by women are for women. Reflecting on gender and her practice as a book reviewer, author and literary critic Lesley McDowell noted that since she started reviewing books for UK publications like The Scotsman and The Times Literary Supplement , the majority of titles that she reviews are written by women. She recalls: ‘Most books reviewers were male, and they tended to choose titles by men. So I carved a niche for myself, reviewing the titles male reviewers didn’t want’ (McDowell 2012: n.p.). That reviewing titles written by women is considered ‘niche’ speaks to the marginalisation of women’s writing and the ease at which it is overlooked by literary editors and reviewers.

76

A. DANE

This pattern also calls into question the authority or legitimacy of women’s literary and creative expression, if men, who most often constitute the majority of reviewers in each publication, do not deign to review a title written by a woman author. The author David Hayden (2018) engaged critically with the persistent trend of men reading men, in an essay entitled, ‘Men still too often see their writing as the canon’. Hayden (2018: n.p.) cites both his personal experience in the literary field, and research conducted by the feminist literary activist organisation VIDA Women in Literary Arts, observing that: There is a stubbornly persistent discourse that is comfortable discussing ‘Serious Books by Serious Men’ in a critical imaginary inhabited only by other ‘Serious Men.’ It elevates male writers and makes female writers disappear—and almost every major male writer that comes along is examined within its parameters.

This practice contributes to a marginalisation of women’s writing within the Australian literary field. And while the legitimacy of titles written by women authors is not predicated on the critical engagement by male reviewers, men do make up the majority of reviewers, so, short of a situation where all book reviewers are to be women, if men were to review a greater proportion of titles written by women, the gender gap might begin to close. The Relationship Between Book Reviews and Sales Performance The relationship between book reviews and bestseller lists can provide insight into the influence that book reviewers have as both agents of consecration within the literary field and as cultural intermediaries beyond the field. Such an insight, in turn, can help to illuminate the places where the literary field and the broader social field overlap. Analysing data provided by Nielsen BookScan on the top 50 highest-selling titles in fiction, non-fiction and poetry from 2003 to 2015 against the descriptive demographic data extracted from book reviews for the same period reveals that, on average, around 2% of titles reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian appear on BookScan’s bestseller list each year. Moreover, titles on the bestseller list are more often reviewed in The Age than in ABR or The Australian, indicating that The Age has a stronger connection to the titles that Australian readers are actually buying. However, that

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

77

just 2% of reviewed titles go on to grace the bestseller lists illustrates the limited influence that the symbolic capital associated with book reviewing has beyond the field of cultural production. There is not a lot of overlap between the highest-selling fiction, nonfiction and poetry titles in a given year and the books discussed in three of the country’s major sites for reviewing, suggesting that the majority of book reviews do not, on their own, form the foundation of a strong sales performance. However, there were titles reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian that also made BookScan’s bestseller list; many of the authors in this group are recognisable and popular authors in the Australian literary sphere (Table 3.2). Non-fiction titles by Peter FitzSimons, fiction titles by Tim Winton, and a mix of fiction and non-fiction by Helen Garner are not only consistently reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian, but are also among the highest-selling titles in their sector. The reliability of Helen Garner and Tim Winton to be highly reviewed and bestsellers aligns with Stephen Romei’s and Susan Wyndham’s comments about the authors whose work they believe demands critical attention. And while the ‘must review’ status of Garner and Winton has been cultivated over many years and through many agents in the field of cultural production, that they are both highly reviewed and high-selling authors suggests that these authors occupy the prominent positions of power in today’s field of cultural production, symbolically wealthy and economically viable. Moreover, Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Geraldine Brooks, Christos Tsiolkas, Anna Funder, Jonathan Franzen, Hannah Kent, Lloyd Jones and Emily Ballou have all won or been shortlisted for major literary prizes, among them the Booker Prize, the National Book Award in the United States, the Miles Franklin, the NSW and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry, demonstrating the interconnected and transnational nature of consecratory institutions in the literary field, and the ways in which a symbolically rich literary reputation can lead to increased readership beyond individuals operating in the field of cultural production. On average, across the 2003–2015 period, women make up around 32% of the authors on the BookScan top-50 bestseller lists. Over the same period, on average the proportion of women reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian is around 33% (Fig. 3.12). While there may only be a small overlap—around 2%—between titles reviewed and titles with a very strong sales performance, there is a

78

A. DANE

Table 3.2 Top-selling titles reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian Year

Title

2003 2004

• Mao’s Last Dancer (2003), Li Cunxin • Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004), Aron Ralston • Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (2004), Helen Garner • Kokoda (2004), Peter FitzSimons • Totem: Totem Poem Plus 40 Love Poems (2004), Luke Davies • The Turning (2004), Tim Winton • Tobruk (2006), Peter FitzSimons • Infidel: My Life (2006), Ayaan Hirsi Ali • Breath (2008), Tim Winton • The Costello Memoirs (2008), Peter Costello and Peter Coleman • The Spare Room (2008), Helen Garner • The Darwin Poems: New Writing (2009), Emily Ballou • The Striped World (2009), Emma Jones • Freedom (2010), Jonathan Franzen • Hand Me Down World (2010), Lloyd Jones • The Finkler Question (2010), Howard Jacobson • 100 Australian Poems of Love and Loss (2011), Jamie Grant (ed.) • All That I Am (2011), Anna Funder • Thirty Australian Poets (2011), Felicity Plunkett (ed.) • Burial Rites (2013), Hannah Kent • Eyrie (2013), Tim Winton • The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), Richard Flanagan • The Rosie Project (2013), Graeme Simsion • Barracuda (2013), Christos Tsiolkas • Hard Choices (2014), Hillary Rodham Clinton • My Story (2014), Julia Gillard • This House of Grief (2014), Helen Garner • The Secret Chord (2015), Geraldine Brooks

2006 2007 2008

2009 2010

2011

2013

2014

2015

stronger connection between the proportion of women authors who are reviewed and the proportion of women authors who sell a high number of copies. This correlation is a translation of the actions and dispositions of the individuals who operate within the field of cultural production to the broader social field. The underlying disposition of these fields is such that rarely do women constitute more than 33% of book reviews or of space on the bestseller lists. Without ending up in a chicken-and-egg paradox, I argue that if more women were reviewed each year, this could influence perceptions around gender and authority that pervade the Australian literary field, and, in turn, influence the social field, translating to women selling a higher proportion of titles.

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

79

Fig. 3.12 Proportion of women authors reviewed versus proportion of bestselling women authors, 2003–2015

The Gap Between Perception and Reality Research into the representation of women in the book review pages of major newspapers and literary magazines conducted in the 1980s shared a number of similarities. One of the most striking of these was the response to this research from the literary editors and reviewers at the publications in question. For Margaret Cooter et al. (1987), Dale Spender (1989) and Marilyn French (published in Spender 1989), the response from the literary editors was either denial that a gender gap existed or the offering of an excuse that usually took the form of ‘there were not enough women reviewers, women essayists or women authors who met the publication’s standards’. After being presented with the data collected by these researchers, the few responsive literary editors most commonly agreed

80

A. DANE

to commit to increasing the proportion of women in the book review pages. In a number of cases, there would be an increase in the proportion of women represented in the reviews sections; however, before long the status quo was reinstated, and the proportion of women reviewed or writing reviews began to decline (Cooter et al. 1987; Spender 1989). A commitment to increase the representation of women in literary spaces like book review sections and cultural magazines requires more than just recognition on the part of the literary editors; changing the disposition of the field unfortunately requires a more active approach. Speaking with literary editors and book reviewers about the representation of women authors in the major sites of reviewing from 1965 to 2015 shows that little has changed since Spender, French and the Women in Publishing collective undertook their research in the 1980s. When I spoke with the literary editor at The Australian, Stephen Romei, he indicated that the tide was turning and that projects such as the VIDA count in the United States and the Stella Count and Stella Prize in Australia had ‘put that issue on the table and raised recognition of it’. Romei (2016) said: I think that people in positions such as mine are much more keenly aware of it than we were before. So, making sure that female writers get reviewed, making sure that you have female critics writing for you, that is certainly a much more conscious part of one’s daily work that it was, say, 10 years ago.

This shows that interventions like the Stella Prize and the Stella Count have brought much-needed awareness to the literary editors. However, being ‘keenly aware’ does not appear to be having the outcome Romei expects. While The Australian does ensure that it has women reviewing, and that women are being reviewed in the publication, raised awareness brought about by initiatives such as the Stella Count and the VIDA count has not had a meaningful effect on the actual proportion of women reviewers and women authors at the publication. Literary publicist Alice Lewinsky (2016) appears to be wary of the ‘increased awareness’ of the gender gap in book reviewing, and its likelihood to effect lasting change. Although the annual Stella Count does shine a spotlight on the discrepancy between the critical attention paid to the writing of men versus that of women authors, Lewinsky is not entirely

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

81

convinced that this is leading to a change in practice on the part of the literary editors. She said: I think that when the Stella Count comes out, people think about it for that red-hot minute, but I think that it kind of goes out the window as you move further into the year. I don’t think that the Stella Count is having an impact on the major broadsheet and the major literary journals, they are not thinking about gender … I don’t think it has a trickle-down effect in terms of major publications and their review coverage.

Lewinsky’s impression of the limited effects of the Stella Count echoes the experiences of the researchers and authors in the 1980s, when quantitative data detailing the limited representation of women in the book review pages was presented to literary editors and if there was any change in practice, it was short-lived. This phenomenon, wherein the dominance of the status quo proves extremely difficult to shift, was never more evident than when I spoke to the editor of Australian Book Review, Peter Rose. Responding to questions around the limited representation of women as reviewers and as authors in the magazine, Rose (2018) said: There has been under-representation, there have been barriers to participation by women, by minorities, and that time’s over. And we do pretty well on the gender front. I think last year it was about 57/43. We’d like it to be parity, but getting there is a little harder, for whatever reasons. But that’s certainly a lot better than it was, say, five years ago.

Rose appears to believe that equal representation of women in the pages of the magazine exists when titles by women make up 43% of the reviews. The most recent Stella Count (Stella Prize 2018a, b) shows that in 2017 women authors made up 40% of the reviews in the publication. This is almost identical to the representation of women authors five years ago: in 2013, 56% of the reviews were of titles written by men, 41% of the titles reviewed were written by women and 3.3% were co-authored by men and women. And while I am not suggesting that the gender is the primary issue that concerns the editorial practices at ABR, this does suggest that literary editors are prone to slipping into old, comfortable, unexamined habits. This is perhaps most evident in Rose’s admission that reaching parity in representation is, for ‘whatever reason’, ‘getting a little harder’. While Jason Steger, literary editor at The Age, did not respond to repeated requests for interview, his former colleague, former literary

82

A. DANE

editor at The Sydney Morning Herald Susan Wyndham, did speak with me about her work as a literary editor of a major daily newspaper, specifically the period from around 2012 when the Nine mastheads began to collaborate, and copy sharing practices between Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra became commonplace. Speaking about the launch of the Stella Count and the increased awareness of the representation of women in the book review pages, Wyndham (2018) said: I was, I suppose, a bit surprised to find in the Stella Count that our pages were short on women, although that was just a pattern revealed right across the board. And it has shifted a bit since then. I’d like to think—and this is slightly tongue-in-cheek but not entirely—that the percentage of women covered and women reviewers in The Age went up a bit once The Age and the Herald were sharing reviews and I was having more input into The Age. I mean, I do think that as a woman working closely with Jason Steger, in the last two or three years I was there, and having to share our reviews as our resources were cut, I do like to think that I brought a bit more of a female perspective…

Wyndham’s hunch is correct: the representation of women in book reviews in The Age did marginally increase when the newspapers started sharing reviews. And this, perhaps, cuts to the heart of a major issue in all three of the reviewing publications examined in this study: the literary editors of The Age and The Australian, along with the editor of ABR, are now, in 2020, all white men aged over 40. The limited inclusion of women and especially of authors of colour in book reviewing is tied to the limited inclusion of non-white people in positions of power in the literary field more broadly, and at these publications specifically. The perceptions around diversity and practice shared by Rose and Romei illustrate the tension that sits at the heart of this issue. Working against the status quo is difficult and requires more than awareness of the inequality. Affording women authors and women reviewers equal access to positions of power in the literary field will more likely come about with activism on the part of those already in power: those with the accumulated symbolic capital to define the parameters of legitimacy and literary value.

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

83

Conclusion Growth in the representation of women authors in the book review pages is slowing, although this slowing of growth differs slightly from genre to genre, and from publication to publication. On the basis of these findings, it also seems likely that women authors and women reviewers will continue to be under-represented for the foreseeable future. Understanding why this is the case is complex. Looking at this analysis genre by genre indicates that rigid and outdated notions around gender, expertise authority and high culture remain. Fiction is the sector where women are most highly represented, compared to the representation of women in non-fiction and poetry reviews. Fiction has long been a sector where women authors have had a strong presence, although there is rarely a year when they have been afforded equal critical engagement. Non-fiction, on the other hand, has long been dominated by men: research has shown that the agenda setters, the historical commentators, the political analysts—that is, the ‘experts’— are typically men, so it follows that the non-fiction authors who grab the attention of literary editors are, in the vast majority of cases, men. And those tasked with engaging critically with their work are also, on the whole, men. A similar argument can be made for the limited representation of women in poetry reviews across the three publications. As poetry is arguably the ‘highest’ literary art form, it appears that the literary editors see it as being for the ‘artist’. And despite the fact that some of Australia’s most celebrated poets are women—poets such as Judith Wright, Dorothy Porter and Ali Cobby Eckermann—the literary editors at the publications analysed in this chapter perhaps see poetry as the product of the lone male genius. I argue that the fact that women authors are continually underrepresented in the book review pages of the major sites of reviewing is an expression of the collective habitus of individuals in the field, and this under-representation has been exacerbated by feelings of uncertainty and instability in the newspaper and magazine publishing sector. The habitus, described by Bourdieu (1993) as the ‘schemes of perception and appreciation’ that operate within the field of cultural production, is the invisible force that influences practice and positions in the field. In The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu (1993) notes that when the number of available positions of power or prestige is challenged, the disposition of

84

A. DANE

the field will shift back to former understandings of perception and appreciation. The number of books being reviewed in ABR and The Australian is in decline, and although the number of books reviewed in The Age appears to be holding steady, the copy sharing practices conducted among the Nine mastheads (Nolan and Ricketson 2019) mean that there is, at the very least, a perception that the opportunities for review across all three Nine papers are under threat. The ‘schemes of perception and appreciation’ in which the agents of consecration seek comfort during insecure times support the dominance of male reviewers and authors. The results of the analysis presented in this chapter suggest that the answer to questions around the under-representation of women authors lies in the attitudes—either conscious or subconscious—to the legitimacy of particular groups’ literary expression and critical viewpoint, held by those in positions of power in the literary field. This is most pronounced in the gender breakdown of the most reviewed authors. On average across the three publications, men make up 88% of the most reviewed authors in the period 2006–2015, almost equal to the period 1965–1975, and 23% greater than the period 1986–1995. The unwillingness of literary editors to seek long-lasting and meaningful change, to work to dismantle the status quo, ensures that men continue to dominate and reap the symbolic profits and prestige. Just as the studies conducted by Cooter et al. (1987) and Spender (1989) have shown, without sustained activism on the part of literary editors there will be no adjustments to the underlying assumptions and judgements that determine the foundation of perceptions of literary value in the Australian literary field. Although this data provides a solid foundation for future study into book reviewing practice, it only addresses a small slice of the sector and neglects the emerging born-digital reviewing platforms, such as Sydney Review of Books, that continue to gain influence within the Australian literary field. Further research is required to assess the changing relationship between gender and book reviewing at the Nine mastheads, research that could shed light on the medium-term effects that the syndication of reviews might have on who is, and who isn’t, being reviewed.

References ABR (2016) Media Kit. Available at: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/ advertise. Accessed 14 July 2018.

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

85

Allington D (2016) Power to the Reader or Degradation of Literary Taste? Professional Critics and Amazon Customers as Reviewers of The Inheritance of Loss. Language and Literature 25(3): 254–278. AustLit (2017a) Data Extracted from Advanced Search of Database, Literary Titles Published 1965–2015. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. AustLit (2017b) About AustLit. Available at: https://www-austlit-edu-au.ezp. lib.unimelb.edu.au/about. Accessed 13 November 2018. Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bode K (2012) Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London: Anthem Press. Bode K and Murphy T (2014) Methods and Canons: An Interdisciplinary Excursion. In: Longley Artur P and Bode K (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu P (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Colmer J (1971) Book Reviewing in Australian Newspapers. Meanjin Quarterly, September: 344–352. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Couper S (2016) Bookish Girls: Gender and Leadership in Australian Trade Publishing. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 27–47. Enright A (2017) Diary. London Review of Books 39(18): 33–35. Goldsworthy K (2013) Everyone’s a Critic. Australian Book Review, May: 20–30. Harvey M and Lamond J (2016) Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013. Australian Humanities Review 60: 84–107. Hayden D (2018) Men Still Too Often See Their Writing as the Canon: An Homage to the Women Who Have Influenced My Writing. LitHub, 25 May. Available at: https://lithub.com/david-hayden-men-still-too-often-see-theirwriting-as-the-canon/. Accessed 14 July 2018. Henshaw M (2016) Interview, 10 October. Heyward M (2017) Interview, 13 February. Knox M (2009) Reviewing the Review. The Book Review and the Book Review Pages: What Place Today and Tomorrow. Australian Author, August: 9–12. Lewinsky A (2016) Interview, 22 November.

86

A. DANE

McDowell L (2012) Woman Book Reviewer Chooses to Review Books by Women, Shocker. Lesley McDowell, Author and Critic. Available at: http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2012/07/woman-bookreviewer-chooses-books-by.html. Accessed 15 January 2020. McLaren J (1981) Book Reviewing in Newspapers, 1948–1978. In: Bennett B (ed) Cross Currents: Magazines and Newspapers in Australian Literature. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, pp. 240–255. Mullins K (2016) Women for Media Report: An Analysis of the Gender Balance of Sources and Experts Across Australian Metropolitan Print Media. Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. Available at: http://www.wlia.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2016/12/Women-for-Media-Report-2016-FINAL.pdf. Accessed 4 July 2018. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2013) Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Structural Reform in the Newspaper Industry on the Marketing of Books. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book: Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 29–39. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2019) The Shrinking of Fairfax Media’s Books Pages: A Microstudy of Digital Disruption. Australian Journalism Review 41 (1): 17–35. Palattella J (2010) The Death and Life of the Book Review. The Nation 21: 25–31. Romei S (2016) Interview, 9 October. Rose P (2018) Interview, 27 March. Roy Morgan (2018) Australian Newspaper Readership. Available at: http:// www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/newspaper-readership. Accessed 14 July 2018. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Squires C (2020) The Review and the Reviewer. In: Baverstock A and Bradford R (eds.) Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. Abingdon: Routledge. Stella Prize (2018a) The Count. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/thecount/. Accessed 6 July 2018. Stella Prize (2018b) About Us. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/ about/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Stinson E (2016a) Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption. Australian Humanities Review 59: 23–43. Stinson E (2016b) Small Publishers and the Miles Franklin Award. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 137–149. Van Rees C J (1983) How a Literary Work Becomes a Masterpiece: On the Threefold Selection Practiced by Literary Criticism. Poetics 12: 397–417.

3

THE BAROMETER OF LITERARY TASTE: GENDER AND BOOK REVIEWS

87

Verboord M (2009) The Legitimacy of Book Critics in the Age of the Internet and Omnivorousness: Expert Critics, Internet Critics and Peer Critics in Flanders and the Netherlands. European Sociological Review 26(6): 623–637. VIDA Women in the Literary Arts (2019) VIDA Count Archives. Available at: https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/previous-counts/. Accessed 22 December 2019. Wyndham S (2017) The Last Literary Editor. Meanjin, Summer. Available at: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-literary-editor/. Accessed 14 July 2018. Wyndham S (2018) Interview, 26 February.

CHAPTER 4

Celebration, Performance and Authority: Gender and Literary Festivals

Literary festivals are celebratory, they are performative and they are very public. These essential characteristics that define the literary or writers festival mean that those who are featured on a literary festival lineup are assumed to be authors that make a meaningful contribution to contemporary literary life. Festivals are also an important part of the book publicity and promotion cycle and being part of a literary festival is a valuable marketing opportunity. The prestigious nature of literary festivals are a common source of debate among agents in the literary field, with questions over their symbolic value and commercial inclinations (Driscoll 2014: 152), and while some view literary festivals as examples of the degradation of literary culture, asserting that audiences represent the increasing commercialisation of literature (see Lawson 2005; Lurie 2004; Meehan 2005), emerging research into the role and symbolic value of writers’ festivals within literary culture suggests that, despite many of their market-orientated activities, literary festivals are an integral part of a city’s literary identity (Driscoll 2014: 152; Ommundsen 2009: 23; Weber 2018: 13). Moreover, the commercial nature of the literary festival, the blending of culture and commerce, is a prime example of the way power is situated in the contemporary literary field. Increasingly, explorations of literary festivals and their role within the literary field take a more nuanced approach, observing the way that festivals act as a synecdoche for inner workings of the broader literary field (Driscoll 2014; Weber 2018). © The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_4

89

90

A. DANE

This chapter uses Millicent Weber’s (2018) framework of ‘festival as field’ to explore the relationship between gender, prestige and the literary festival program. I argue that the literary festival, as a microcosm of the literary field, is structured in such a way that power resides in specific spaces, spaces that are typically reserved for white male writers, and that although women authors have long been a mainstay in literary festival programming, the work they engage in within the structure of the literary festival is less commonly associated with power and prestige. In Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture, Weber (2018: 187) notes that the literary festival is a space in which creators, contributors, intermediaries, and consumers come together to enact their engagement with literature, and it is also a space in which these individuals accrue and mobilise symbolic and economic capital….

making the literary festival an ideal space to interrogate the way that gender, prestige and power interact. The literary festival is an event that pays homage to literature and writers. Beth Driscoll describes one of the defining characteristics of the writers’ festival as the ‘reverential treatment of elite literary authors’ (Driscoll 2014: 159). Like literary prizes, these events celebrate the work of authors and promote notions of literary prestige. Despite the criticism, it is the combination of prestige and commercial considerations that makes the writers’ festival a powerful cultural mediator in Bourdieu’s adapted literary field. Ommundsen (2009: 33) captures both the essential nature of literary festivals and the way that literary festivals fit within a Bourdieusian framework, reconceived in a contemporary Australian context, observing that: The popularity of literary festivals does not spell the end of literary culture so much as the remarkable ability of this culture to adapt itself to new environments without losing its distinctive features. Festivals are complex, contradictory, trivial, serious and seriously addictive, as is literature itself. They do not replicate the silent communication between writers, texts and readers, but function as extension of it, enactments of literature as cultural form and commodity.

In this chapter, I interrogate the relationship between gender and literary festivals by analysing the Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

91

Writers Festival programs to understand the representation of women at these two literary festivals, how the representation of women in the program has changed over time, and what the representation of women authors at Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival suggests in terms of the broader representation of women within Australia’s literary field, and beyond. While on the surface there appears to be a relatively strong representation of women in these literary festival programs, upon closer inspection the same long-held gendered structure that influences the actions of other agents of consecration in the literary field is evident. Not all literary festival events are created equal and, breaking down each event into its component parts—keynote speakers, session moderators and panel discussants—reveals that white men continue to dominate, occupying more space and being given more opportunities by festival programmers to participate in field-defining public discussions. Just like in the literary field more broadly, when it comes to programming a literary festival men are more commonly afforded access to the positions that denote prestige and power. This systematic collection and analysis of long-term descriptive demographic data from two of Australia’s most prominent literary festivals— data that describes the complex relationship between gender and the festival programs—provides significant insights into the ways that festival programming has changed over the years and the places where festival programming has struggled to evolve. What emerges from this analysis is the way that both Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival have remained faithful to the rigid ideas of authority, representation and importance that underpin the literary field more broadly; all the interlocking and interdependent agents vie for positions in the complex hierarchy, and this position-taking occurs against a tension between culture and commerce. The criticism of the role of literary festivals as agents of consecration, with the accumulated symbolic capital to legitimise authors, is largely centred on the festivals’ relationship with their audiences beyond the field of cultural production, with the increasing variety of content at the festivals, and with the commercial inclinations of the events. In an exploration of the audiences who attended writers’ festivals, Wenche Ommundsen argues that some members of the literary field—critics, authors, reviewers and commentators—have little regard for the audience of writers’ festivals (Ommundsen 2009). Despite research by Driscoll that shows that

92

A. DANE

the audiences at literary festivals are tertiary educated with ‘sophisticated’ literary tastes, the perception of the audience as ‘ordinary’ remains (Driscoll 2014: 163). The connection drawn between the audience profile of literary festivals—primarily women and middlebrow—and the role of the festival audience in the degradation of literary culture speaks to the gendered attitudes that pervade the perceptions of literary value and merit that sit below the surface of the Australian literary field. However, it is not only the audience who are held exclusively responsible for the decline of literary culture through literary festivals, those who criticise the value of literary festivals often look to the ‘broadening’ of the festival program, along with the audience, as an example of the decline in literary culture. Cori Stewart observes that writers’ festival programs have gone beyond the literary to include genre authors, celebrities, politicians, chefs and other public figures (Stewart 2013: 264). This is evident in the Adelaide Writers Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival programs, where culinary celebrities like Maggie Beer and political figures such as Bob Brown have graced the program. Despite these criticisms, literary festivals continue to be a highly visible part of the publishing field and, like other agents in the field, are in a constant struggle for symbolic capital. Although the consecratory validity of the literary festival is consistently contested, the status of each individual festival is closely linked to the headline or keynote speaker (Stewart 2013: 258). An exchange of capital occurs between the symbolically wealthy authors invited to speak at a literary festival and the event itself, each lending the other credibility and prestige and, over time the symbolic position of the authors invited to speak at a literary festival helps establish the symbolic position of the festival itself. In an effort to identify the most prestigious of Australia’s literary festivals, author John Birmingham (2010: 15) surveyed the field and concluded that Adelaide Writers Week’s rich history and strong reputation among authors enabled the event to attract the ‘biggest names’ and, in turn, bolster their reputation among authors. This two way and generative exchange of capital between literary festivals and authors is integral to their place in the literary field. And, like all consecratory institutions in the literary field, the more ‘literary’ or autonomous that literary festival programs appear to be, the stronger their position or symbolic reputation within the hierarchy of the field. For Simone Murray (2012), the literary reputation of a literary festival program can be understood through a model of three concentric circles. At the centre of the model is the most prestigious festival with a program

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

93

that focuses on literature and poetry. Adelaide Writers Week’s program could be classified as being part of this central circle. The second (middle) circle is characterised by an inclusion of genre and non-fiction authors and the third (outer) circle could be classified as more of a ‘festival of ideas’ (Murray 2012: 99). The Melbourne Writers Festival program sits within the second or middle circle, with the inclusion of a number of authors from across the publishing industry, and a strong focus on authors of non-fiction titles. The ‘explosion of literary festivals’, as Ommundsen (2000: 176) describes it, has cemented these events as an integral part of the Australian contemporary publishing field. As agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries with varying degrees of symbolic capital, their power to prescribe value is mixed. However, despite their detractors, festivals play a significant role in a nation’s literary character. Reading Murray, Stewart, Ommundsen and Birmingham’s explanations and explorations of the literary festival through Weber’s (2018) ‘festival as field’ lens helps us to avoid the rigid dichotomy of culture/commerce or autonomous/heteronomous that has long plagued the study of literary festivals. Instead, the broadening of the literary festival program, the on-site festival bookshop and the competition for prestigious international keynotes—that is, the struggle between the commercial and the literary identity of the event—is not a symptom of the decay of literature as an art form; rather, it is a small-scale expression of the literary ecosystem at work. Weber (2018: 32) observes, ‘through the acquisition of cultural, social and economic capital … literary festivals reproduce the structure and characteristic tensions of the literary field’. In this chapter I investigate the ways in which gender interacts with the literary field, taking the literary festival program as a framework to understand power and prestige. Using a quantitative analysis of the Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival programs, I explore how the interaction of prestige and gender plays out on the literary festival stage. The relationship between gender and literary festivals has attracted the attention of scholars; however, it is most often the gender of the audiences that has been the subject of this research. Research has shown that women are overwhelmingly represented among the attendees of literary festivals (Driscoll 2014: 163), a fact that critics of the festival have often weaponised to undermine the ‘seriousness’ or ‘cultural value’ of events. Ommundsen (2009: 22) notes:

94

A. DANE

The casual observation … that festival audiences are predominantly middleclass, middlebrow, middle-aged and female is perceived as a problem, a threat to the status of literature as an art form.

Similarly, in her study of the ‘Middlebrow pleasures of literary festivals’, Beth Driscoll (2014: 165) notes that: the preponderance of women at the literary festival marks this middle-class audience as firmly middlebrow. As such, these participants form a target for disparagement from scholars and media.

This echoes the broader perceptions of the ‘legitimacy’ of women’s literary expression explored in this book, where there appears to be an almost unwavering appreciation for the writing of men. An analysis of the way that gender plays out within the Adelaide Writers’ Week and Melbourne Writers Festival program, a microcosm of the literary field, helps to provide an understanding of the perception of women authors, authority and legitimacy that underpins the broader questions that define this study. Literary festivals are a growing segment of the Australian and international literary field. All of Australia’s major cities play host to a literary festival, along with many regional centres: the Tamar Valley, Newcastle, Margaret River, Grenfell, Bowral, Mildura, Alice Springs and Bateman’s Bay all have their own literary festivals. Moreover, the appetite for literary festivals does not appear to be slowing: in 2018, 134,000 people attended Adelaide Writers Week, a record for the festival (Adelaide Festival 2018). The literary festival is a particularly interesting consecratory institution to study, especially where issues of access and equality are concerned. On the surface, it appears that the literary festival is a sector where women lead the charge: festival audiences are overwhelmingly made up of women, and as I will explore in more detail below, the broad representation of women in the program is strong and is typically higher than in other segments such as book reviewing. However, scratching the surface of this data reveals a complex, albeit familiar, story around the ways women are represented on the festival stage.

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

95

Adelaide Writers Week Starting in 1960, Adelaide Writers Week is Australia’s longest-running festival dedicated exclusively to authors, books and writing. What began as a writers-only event in 1960, soon became what we now understand to be the contemporary literary festival, and by 1964 Writers Week was a celebration of writers by readers (Ommundsen 2000). Writers Week’s ‘seminar for writers’ origins have perhaps helped to establish Adelaide Writers Week as the most ‘literary’ of the Australian literary festivals. Over the past half a century, Adelaide Writers’ Week has held the title of the most prestigious and well-respected festival in the country (Birmingham 2010; Starke 1998). Book publicist Alice Lewinsky described Adelaide Writers Week as ‘a real literary festival’ because of the focus the festival still has on authors of literary fiction and poetry, books, and writing. Ommundsen (2009) observes that the festival ‘retains an international reputation as a kind of model, the festival to emulate, or the one to beat’. Since Writers Week’s early days, the festival has played host to a number of prominent local and international guests, indicating that the mutual exchange of symbolic capital between the festival and the speakers sits at the centre of programming decisions. The 1976 Writers’ Week is a prime example of the kind of writers this festival attracts; James Baldwin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Shirley Hazzard, Tennessee Williams and Kurt Vonnegut were among the speakers.

Melbourne Writers Festival Since the inaugural event in 1986, the ‘internationally significant Melbourne Writers Festival’ (Driscoll 2014: 153) has established its reputation as a literary festival that attracts big-name authors with bigname reputations. What started out as a biennial weekend of events, the Melbourne Writers Festival now runs each year for more than a fortnight. And while the festival might not have the long and rich history that Adelaide Writers’ Week enjoys, when it comes to programming prestigious authors, Melbourne Writers Festival attracts both the popular and the prestigious: Christopher Koch, Elizabeth Jolley, Bryce Courtenay, Kim Scott, Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen have all made multiple appearances at the event. These two festivals also have an archive of festival programs, made available online, through the festival headquarters and the State Library

96

A. DANE

of Victoria. These archives enable the development of a rich dataset that details the acquisition of symbolic capital throughout the festivals’ history.

Notes on Method Descriptive demographic data was collected from the Adelaide Writers Week (1966–2015) and Melbourne Writers Festival (1986–2015) programs. Up until 2012, Adelaide Writers’ Week occurred biennially, as did the Melbourne Writers Festival until 1990. The name and gender of each individual named in the program was collected, and whether or not the speaker was of First Nations heritage. I also noted the ‘type’ of event each speaker was involved with, as well as their role at that event, where available. For example, at the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival, author Kate Grenville was a participant in a panel discussion entitled ‘Why I Read’ alongside Chris Womersley. Antoni Jach moderated the panel discussion. Both Adelaide Writers Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival program a number of different events; the most common throughout the period studied are readings, panel discussions, one-on-one ‘in conversation’ events (known at Adelaide Writers Week as ‘meet the author’), book launches and lectures. All these events have different functions; however, this chapter will focus on the representation of women at the festival overall, as invited guest or keynote speakers, as participants in panel discussions, and at ‘in conversation’ events.

Gender and the Literary Festival Analysis of the relationship between gender and the Adelaide Writers Week and Melbourne Writers Festival programs across the period studied shows that, on the whole, women writers are more strongly represented at literary festivals than they are, for example, in the book review pages of major broadsheet newspapers. However, the picture is not quite as simple as it first appears, and the relationship between gender and two prominent Australian literary festivals is complex. Throughout the period 1966–2015 participation of women authors at Adelaide Writers’ Week grew. Representation of women at the festival was small in the beginning—the 1966 program featured just two women: Mary Durack and Nancy Keesing—however, it grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1992 the festival featured more women writers

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

97

than men, among them Thea Astley, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Lily Brett, Helen Garner and Carmel Bird. From this peak in 1992, the number of women speaking at the festival ebbed and flowed—hovering in and around 44%—never again reaching its 1992 high (Fig. 4.1). Since the inaugural event in 1986, the proportion of women in the Melbourne Writers Festival program has remained consistently strong, when compared to their representation within other consecratory institutions. While, on average, the proportion of women speaking at the festival sits at around 45%, there have been five years across the festival’s history— 1988, 1994, 2005, 2013 and 2015—when women have constituted the majority of speakers in the program. In light of the fact that women generally make up the majority of literary festival audiences (Driscoll 2014), it is unsurprising that women are so strongly represented among the programmed authors. However, it is important to keep in mind that women have consistently published the majority of Australian fiction, non-fiction and poetry titles since the early 2000s (AustLit Database 2017), meaning that at both festivals women are consistently and disproportionally under-represented. Lisa Dempster (2018), is a former Artistic Director and CEO of the Melbourne Writers Festival, and throughout the period of her tenure as Artistic Director of the festival that falls within the sample of this study (2013–2015), the proportion of women at the festival increased; this was most likely due to a conscious effort on the part of Dempster and the programming team. In speaking with Dempster, she was keen to emphasise that increasing the representation of women and authors of colour on panels and as keynotes was a primary objective. It was really striking to me walking through a festival which is 70 to 80 per cent female audience and to see men’s voices given so much prominence within those spaces. And that’s something that I really worked to deconstruct.

And although Dempster’s efforts appear to be reflected in the analysis of the Melbourne Writers Festival program and the gender of the authors/speakers, a simple analysis of the gender of the speakers in the program is, at best, superficial. Understanding the complex relationship that exists between gender and the literary festival program requires a more nuanced treatment.

Fig. 4.1 Representation of women authors/speakers in the Adelaide Writers Week and Melbourne Writers Festival programs

98 A. DANE

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

99

Keynotes Not all positions in the literary festival program are created equal and there are events within each program that have a higher profile than others. The process of programming individual authors/speakers for different events in different spaces and at different times plays a significant role in the way that literary festivals both confer and display symbolic capital. The active and intricate curatorship of the events within the literary festival program is an act of legitimisation of the speakers by the festival organisers, the effect or strength of which varies according to the programming decisions. Often an author’s role at the festival— whether they are part of a panel discussion or are invited to deliver the opening night address—can reflect their accumulated symbolic capital and, therefore, their position within the literary field. Arguably the events that denote the most prestige at the literary festival are the keynote lectures. Across the history of both Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival there has been a range of designations for these events: often they are known as either a keynote or an opening/closing address, and at other times they are identified in the program as a lecture, but almost every festival within the sample period had a number of programmed events at which an author stood up alone to formally address the audience. Being invited to deliver a lecture at a literary festival signifies the acknowledgement of a number of things associated with the author: a level of expertise; a significant and respected reputation among their peers and an established profile among the reading public. These three elements are integral in the selection of a keynote speaker as attracting both a large audience and event coverage in the arts section of local newspapers is important for the festival itself. Over the history of Adelaide Writers’ Week, lectures have been given by the authors such as Geoffrey Blainey, Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, Robert Dessaix, Jeanette Winterson and Drusilla Modjeska. A similarly impressive list of names have delivered lectures at the Melbourne Writers Festival: Alexis Wright, Anita Heiss, Rodney Hall, Noel Pearson, David Malouf, Eleanor Catton and Isabel Allende, among them (Fig. 4.2). The gender breakdown of authors who delivered keynote lectures throughout the sample period shows that, in each decade, men consistently occupy more space than women at the podium. Moreover, it does not appear to be the case that women have been afforded an increasing amount of space over the period. And while the number of women

Fig. 4.2 Gender breakdown of keynote speakers at Adelaide Writers Week, per decade

100 A. DANE

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

101

authors invited to deliver a lecture at Adelaide Writers’ Week has grown since 1966, comparing the representation of women delivering lectures in the period 1966–1975 with the period 2006–2015 reveals that this growth has only been around 10 percentage points, and a greater proportion of women delivered keynote lectures in the five festivals between 1988 and 1994 than they did in either the five festivals between 1996 and 2004 or the seven festivals between 2006 and 2015. The strong representation of women keynote speakers during the period 1988 and 1994 was also the period with the overall strongest representation of women at Adelaide Writers Week, suggesting that there may be a connection between the programming of a higher proportion of women speakers throughout the program as a whole, and the proportion of women who are programmed as keynote speakers (Fig. 4.3). When it comes to the Melbourne Writers Festival, the picture does improve, albeit marginally. Where there has been some growth in the proportion of women delivering lectures at the festival over the 20 years to 2015, the proportion of women programmed as keynote speakers at the Melbourne Writers Festival sits between 28 and 33%. Lisa Dempster noted that when she took over as Artistic Director of the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2013, that on just two occasions had a woman delivered the opening night address: Germaine Greer, both times. Analysis of the Melbourne Writers Festival programs from 1986 to 2015 confirms Dempster’s assertion: Germaine Greer was the only woman to open the festival over the 30-year period. On both occasions, Greer spoke about feminism. And while public discussions about feminism are important, a recurring theme in the programming of literary festivals seems to be that women are typically tasked with discussing issues around gender

Fig. 4.3 Gender breakdown of keynote speakers at Melbourne Writers Week, per decade

102

A. DANE

and representation, and the more ‘serious’ side of writing is left to the non-Indigenous men. What is perhaps more concerning than the representation of women among the speakers is the representation of First Nations authors—and particularly First Nations women authors—among the keynote speakers. Only five First Nations authors gave a lecture or opening address at Adelaide Writers Week from 1966 to 2015 and Sally Morgan, who spoke on two occasions, was the only First Nations woman. While the representation of First Nations authors as keynote speakers is slightly higher at the Melbourne Writers Festival, from 1986 to 2015 there were only 10 First Nations authors who delivered a keynote address, six of them women. This suggests that even though, across the board, representation of women at literary festivals is relatively high, when it comes to the most prestigious events—the events that hold up individual authors as expert voices in the literary field—women, and in particular First Nations women, are consistently overlooked. This raises questions around broad perceptions of gender, race and authority that pervade the literary field: dispositions that appear difficult to transform and have come up again and again throughout this research. On average, over the period 1965–2015, the proportion of book reviews in ABR, The Age and The Australian dedicated to titles written by women was around 26%; and throughout the same period, 33% of all keynotes at Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival were women. A greater proportion of women deliver keynotes at writers’ festivals than grace the book pages of the major sites of review, but I would argue that there is a relationship between the two. Looking at the authors who both delivered a keynote address and had a title reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian across the sample period—around 87% of the keynote speakers—69% were men and 31% women. And while there is a slightly higher proportion of women who were both keynote speakers and were reviewed across the period compared to the proportion of women reviewed, it is clear that where the most coveted spots in the literary festival program are concerned, the gender gap persists, and this research indicates that a link exists between the low representation of women in book reviews and the gender gap in literary festival keynote speakers. The attention, and therefore promotion, that comes from being reviewed in one of the country’s major newspapers is bound to feed into the audience’s awareness of the title and its author, but will also catch the attention of the festival programmers. When discussing the process by

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

103

which authors are selected for the festival program, Dempster reported that the programming team ‘pick out which titles and authors we think are going to be the highest-profile, and have the most interest’. This ‘profile’ is in part built by literary coverage in major newspapers and cultural magazines. The connection between agents of consecration is also evident when examining the proportion of keynote speakers who also won or were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Again, Dempster’s account of the process of putting together the program signals to the accumulated symbolic capital of the keynote speakers: A big name is really important, so someone that’s recognisable, because a keynote event forms a key part of the festival marketing campaign, so it’s got to be someone who people feel excited to come and see.

Winners of major literary awards, especially Miles Franklin Winners, are often ‘big names’ who can attract a big festival crowd. Forty-six of the keynotes across the sample period—around 12%—were also shortlisted for one of these literary awards: 76% were men and 24% women. This proportion is lower than the gender gap on the prize shortlists: over the 1965–2015 period women made up around 45% of shortlisted authors. This demonstrates that the gender gap in literary prizes is narrower than that in literary festival keynotes who have also been shortlisted for a literary prize, and indicates that winning or being shortlisted for a literary prize has a more positive knock-on effect for men when it comes to festival programming decisions than it does for women. And while 12% might not seem like a significant overlap between the keynote speakers and the authors who were shortlisted for a literary prize, it is important to keep in mind that many keynote speakers at both Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival are not from Australia and are therefore ineligible for the literary prizes in this sample: authors like Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Jeanette Winterson and Mona Eltahawy have all delivered keynote lectures at Adelaide Writers Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival and the drawcard of an international speaker forms a significant part of the festival’s promotion and in our conversation. Dempster was keen to address the dominance of white men as keynotes at the Melbourne Writers Festival throughout her tenure as Artistic Director, saying:

104

A. DANE

I also really cared to make sure that the keynotes that we had across the festival—so, we do four to five keynotes across a single festival—that they represented a diversity of voices. So men and women, people of colour, and old and young, so there wasn’t a sort of homogenous approach to the keynotes, that they were all considered in relation to each other.

However, despite Dempster’s conscious efforts, there was not a particularly meaningful increase in the proportion of women keynotes at the festival during the portion of Dempster’s tenure as Artistic Director that falls within this study’s sample period. This is highlights entrenched programming structures where, perhaps, white men dominate, and how transformation only comes with a more activist approach. In the three years of this study where Dempster was Artistic Director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, Boris Johnson, Salman Rushdie and Louis De Bernieres opened the festival. Dempster’s conscious efforts to transform the profile of keynote speakers did not appear to extend to the festival’s marquee event. In Conversation Among the most coveted events in the literary festival program are the one-on-one author ‘in conversation’ events. Known at Adelaide Writers’ Week for many years as ‘meet the author’, and at Melbourne as ‘in conversation’, ‘literary conversations’ and ‘spotlight on…’ sessions, these events are typically a discussion between an author and another member of the literary field—the chair or moderator of the session—who is most often a critic, another author or a cultural commentator. In these sessions, authors and moderators engage in a conversation around the author’s life and work. Literary publicist Alice Lewinsky describes the attraction of these events for authors thus: For the author themselves, it gives them a great moment in the sun and makes them feel like they have done something worthwhile and people are recognising it, they get to talk about their work—which some authors hate and some authors love—and they can talk about their craft with people they respect, surrounded by a supportive crowd.

The drawcard for these events is undoubtedly the author in question; I don’t suspect that many festivalgoers attend an event based on who

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

105

is chairing the session. Beth Driscoll’s (2014: 168) analysis of writers’ festival audience feedback revealed that: When moderators are effective, they are rarely commented upon, however, many survey respondents commented on the need for better moderators, and particularly ones who were less intrusive.

This indicates that festival audiences, which contain a mix of book lovers, writers and other agents of the literary field (Ommundsen 2009), would prefer minimal input from the moderator in order to hear the most from the author they have come to see. In light of this, it is interesting to examine the representation of women at the ‘in conversation’ sessions at the Melbourne Writers Festival, as both the featured authors and as the moderators (Fig. 4.4).1 Taking the featured authors and the moderators as a whole, women on average make up around 42% of the speakers at these events from the early 1990s. However, separating out the moderators and the featured authors shows that on average women represent over 52% of moderators but just 34% of featured authors. There are just four years across the sample period when there were more women featured as authors than as moderators: 1990, 1994, 2005 and 2007. Sixty per cent of the time women are the majority of moderators at the festival events, but just 4% of the time they are the majority of featured authors. In other words, women are far more likely to be placed in the role of facilitator than expert. And when this discrepancy is viewed through the lens of the role of the writers’ festival—as events tasked with both the distribution and the reflection of symbolic capital in the literary field—women appear to be more likely to be playing the secondary, supportive and less symbolically valuable function. Speaking about disparity between the proportion of women at these events as the featured author and as a moderator or facilitator, Lisa Dempster said: I think it’s sexism. Women are more likely to be put in supporting roles than in the main roles, and that is something I worked hard on … I really 1 At Adelaide Writers’ Week, on average women make up around 44% of the ‘meet the author’ authors each year. This figure is consistent with the overall number of women represented at the festival. Adelaide Writers’ Week does not consistently list the details of the moderators of these sessions in its program (Starke 1998) so it is difficult to see the proportion of women authors to women moderators at these events.

106

A. DANE

Fig. 4.4 Proportion of women featured authors at in conversation events versus the proportion of women moderators at in conversation events at Melbourne Writers Festival wanted to bring women to the fore and make sure that women’s voices were put in a central position within the program … I think women are more, just more willing to step up into a variety of different roles in the literary industry.

This discrepancy is further evidenced by the relationship between ‘in conversation’ events and prize-winning and shortlisted authors. Around 12% of the ‘in conversation’ authors also won or were shortlisted for a literary prize in this study’s sample: of the authors who were involved in ‘in conversation’ events and were shortlisted for a major prize, 55% were men, 45% women. However, when it comes to the prize-winning and shortlisted authors who were involved with the facilitation or moderation

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

107

of ‘in conversation’ events, 55% of the authors were women. Therefore, even though women are under-represented as participants at ‘in conversation’ events broadly, and represented a smaller proportion of the prize winners and shortlisted authors involved, they still constitute the majority of prize winners and shortlisted authors tasked with facilitating the discussion. The prestige of winning or being shortlisted for a literary prize may pave a way for women authors to be asked to participate at a literary festival, however, it does not ensure that the nature of that participation is as a facilitator and not as the feature. Speaking with the prize-winning author Charlotte Wood about the higher proportion of women authors moderating ‘in conversation’ events, she noted: Well the moderator thing is so clearly, it’s like because women are nice and want to be a part of a community and it’s a shitload of work and it’s really badly paid. So, men aren’t interested in that. And quite sensibly a lot of the time, because it is often a really thankless job. I mean, I do a little bit of it but not very much anymore. Weirdly one of the things as my reputation has built I’m doing less of that kind of handmaideny [sic] stuff.

Wood touches on one of the potentially problematic side effects of a lack of representative inclusion in the halls of literary power. When one group—white men, in the case of the literary field—takes up such a disproportionate amount of space within a field, the non-dominant group perhaps sees the chance to take up any space at all as an attractive prospect, even if that space is not as symbolically valuable. Dempster also noted that attitudes to moderating differ between men and women in the Australian literary field: In my experience … every writer that has ever told me, ‘Oh, I don’t do moderating’ has been a man.

This could go some way to explain why the proportion of women reviewers in ABR, The Age and The Australian is higher than the proportion of women reviewed. Or in the festival context, it could help explain why the representation of women in panel discussion events is greater at 45% than the representation of women at the more coveted festival events such as the subject of the ‘in conversation’ events (37%) or keynote

108

A. DANE

addresses (33%). It could be that women authors question whether they have the acquired the symbolic clout to refuse to moderate a panel discussion or in conversation event and still be invited back to speak the next time they have a new book to promote. Panel Discussions The relationship between literary festival panel discussions and the book review pages of ABR, The Age and The Australian reveals that there is considerable overlap between the two. More than 53% of the individuals—who are not always published authors—who either moderated or were featured on a festival panel from 1965 to 2015 were authors reviewed in one of the sample publications. And, of the authors who were reviewed and participated in a festival panel discussion over the sample period, 57% of them were men and 43% women. This proportion differs significantly from the proportion of women who were reviewed over the period 1965–2015—when titles written by women constitute, on average over the period, around 26% of the reviews—but is consistent with the 45% of women who participated in panel discussions. If the festival is considered as a microcosm of the broader literary field, then within the field of the festival, women authors are afforded greater access to symbolic rewards that the broader field as a whole. However, it is clear that they still reach a ceiling that, in the vast majority of cases, means that they are never consistently represented equally. This pattern is again evident when it comes to the panel discussion participants who were shortlisted or won literary prizes. Just over 3% of the authors who were involved in panel discussion events at Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival from 1966 to 2015 were winners or were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin or the NSW or Victorian state literary prizes for fiction, non-fiction and poetry: 55% were men and 45% women. Again, this proportion is not consistent with the representation of women among winners and shortlisted authors more broadly, but is consistent with the representation of women in the literary festival programs, further reinforcing the notion that although women authors are more strongly represented within literary festival programs than they are within the broader literary field, a ceiling of representation remains. The panel sessions at Adelaide Writers Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival demonstrate that literary festivals are not just events where being invited to participate denotes a particular level of symbolic capital;

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

109

they are also opportunities for the authors participating to showcase and assert their accumulated symbolic capital. Beth Driscoll (2014: 153) observes that: Panel sessions debate issues such as national canons, the development of genres, the merits of popular versus literary fiction and the political responsibilities of literature.

Reading Driscoll’s description through a Bourdieusian lens, wherein the power in the field of cultural production lies in the space where the value of particular cultural expression is defined, suggests that those invited to participate in a literary festival panel discussion occupy powerful positions in the field and their conversations contribute to the broader, fieldwide understanding of literary production and the production of value. Participants, it follows, acquire symbolic capital from involvement in the sessions, and with these sessions they are given the opportunity to express that power. In the case of Adelaide Writers’ Week, mixed-gender discussion panels increased in popularity from 1966 to 2015. In the period 1966–1975, just 30% of panel discussions featured both men and women participants; this figure peaked in the decade 1996–2005 at around 74% of the sessions. The opposite is the case for the Melbourne Writers Festival. Throughout the first decade of the festival, 1986–1995, more than 90% of the sessions had a mixed-gender panel and in the final period of the sample, 2006– 2015, this figure dropped back to just over 62%. Interrogating the gender of panellists in the literary festival program not only contributes to our understanding of whether men or women occupy more space in these potentially industry-defining discussions, but also looking at the changing makeup of panels over time can shed some light on the evolving position of women authors as authorities in the literary field (Fig. 4.5). There were no mixed-gender panels where women constituted the majority of speakers on the panel at Adelaide Writers’ Week from 1966 to 1975, however, despite the fact that men dominated half of all the panel discussions in this period, half of the panels had an equal number of men and women. The number of mixed-gender panel discussions where women constituted the majority of participants did grow across the sample period—in 2006–2015 it had sat at around 25%—however, across the five decades, the vast majority of panel discussions, at least in terms of the participating authors, were dominated by men (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.5 Gender breakdown of mixed-gender panels at Adelaide Writers’ Week, per decade

110 A. DANE

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

111

Fig. 4.6 Gender breakdown of mixed-gender panels at Melbourne Writers Festival, per decade

A similar picture emerges of the mixed-gender panels at the Melbourne Writers Festival. What is perhaps troubling is that across the three decades the number of panel sessions where women were the majority of participants shrank, going from around 36% in the period 1986–1995 to just 23% in 2006–2015. It appears that panels with equal numbers of men and women have taken the space once occupied by panels dominated by women, despite the fact that panels overrun with men have retained their dominance. There are two issues at play here, and it could be argued that one begets the other. First, when it comes to selecting authors to debate the major questions that define the Anglophone literary field, more men than women are seen as suitable for the task. Second, because men are more often given the space to engage in these debates—or at least more space than women—they are more often viewed by others in the field as occupying these positions of authority on matters centred upon definitions of value and quality. And the cycle continues. Mixed-gender panels don’t represent the full picture of panel sessions at either Adelaide Writers’ Week or the Melbourne Writers Festival. There is a significant proportion of panel sessions where the entire panel is either all men or all women. And, in the case of the Melbourne Writers Festival, this number of single-gender panels is increasing: just 8.1% of panel sessions in the period 1986–1995 were either all men or all women, but in 2006–2015 this had grown to 37.5%. When it comes to panel discussion that exclusively feature men, Adelaide Writers’ Week has made a notable transformation: from a festival where the majority of all panel sessions were all-male in the period 1986–1995, it has become one where the majority of sessions are mixed-gender and there are fairly equal numbers of all-male and all-women panels. It is important, once again, to make

112

A. DANE

special mention of the decade 1986–1995 when, for the first and only time across the two festivals studied, there were more all-women panels than panels featuring just men. This is the period with the highest representation of women participating at the festival, and the period when the highest number of women were invited to deliver the festival’s keynote addresses, a period where the representation of white women in the Anglophone literary field was at the forefront of debate. This only serves to support the notion that access to the symbolic capital associated with interaction with agents of consecration afforded to women authors is not necessarily increasing at a steady rate (Fig. 4.7). The changes over three decades of Melbourne Writers Festival programming don’t appear to keep pace with Adelaide Writers’ Week. Not only has the proportion of mixed-gender panels decreased over the 1986–2015 period, but also the growth in the number of all-male panels at the festival far exceeds the growth in all-women panels. This again raises questions around the approach to programming at the festival and, more broadly, the perceived expertise of women authors in Australia when it comes to debating the larger questions that define the field (Fig. 4.8). In order to understand whether or not there are different expectations of men and women panels, and indeed different assumptions about expertise in the literary field, I analysed the panel session titles for the all-male and all-women panels from Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival. Using an open coding process, I classified the panel discussions from both festivals’ programmed panel sessions into six categories: gender, family, sex and romance, literature and writing, and other. These categories were selected because they were the most commonly discussed books and writing-related subjects across the two festivals (the ‘other’ category represents a catch-all for the non-literary topics discussed which included journalism, politics, film and music) (Tables 4.1 and 4.2). Panels comprised exclusively of men are more likely, at both festivals, to speak on the topic of literature and writing. Conversely, a significant proportion of the panel discussions tackled by women-only panels focus on the topic of gender. And while the issue of gender in Australia’s literary culture is important to discuss, it occupies more than a quarter of the 83 all-women discussions that have been staged at the Melbourne Writers Festival since 1986. Perhaps if we gave all-women panels a greater opportunity to speak about literature and writing, we wouldn’t have to have so many panels called, ‘Battle of the Sexes’ (2010), ‘Caution: Women at Work’ (1994), ‘Women in Culture’ (2012) or ‘Brains, Genes and Gender’

Fig. 4.7 Gender breakdown of panel discussions at Adelaide Writers’ Week, per decade

4 CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

113

114

A. DANE

Fig. 4.8 Gender breakdown of panel discussions at Melbourne Writers Festival, per decade

Table 4.1 Adelaide Writers Week panel discussion topics, 1966–2015

Category

Gender Family Sex and romance Literature and writing Other

Table 4.2 Melbourne Writers Festival panel discussion topics, 1986–2015

Category

Gender Family Sex and romance Literature and writing Other

All W panels: panel discussions (%)

All M panels: panel discussions (%)

19.1 4.3 6.4 44.7

0.0 2.4 0.0 57.8

25.5

39.8

All W panels: panel discussions (%)

All M panels: panel discussions (%)

25.9 5.2 8.1 38.5

3 0.5 0.5 58.3

22.2

37.7

(2015). Similarly, men are rarely required to engage with the topic of sex and romance, while, for example, an all-women panel took on the topic of ‘Love Junkies’ in 1994. Over a quarter of the all-women panels at Adelaide Writers’ Week engaged with these issues, but not one all-male panel was tasked with such a challenge. The same can be seen with the

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

115

discussion of the topic of family. Again, all-women panels were more likely to engage with the topic—such as ‘A Mother’s Love’ in 2015—suggesting that these are considered to be ‘women’s subjects’. How, then, would we classify the writing of Tim Winton, George Johnston and Peter Carey if it is not about sex, romance and family? The programming decisions made at the Melbourne Writers Festival appear to be slightly more problematic. Just looking at the raw numbers shows that, over the period studied, there were 116 all-male panels that discussed literature and writing, as opposed to just 52 all-women panels on the same subject. This analysis echoes Katherine Bode’s (2008: 445) explanation of the essentialist understanding that underpins Australia’s literary culture: that men write important and groundbreaking literature and women write frivolous women’s fiction that centres on ‘women’s topics’ such as the home, family and romance. In a similar vein, there were three panels at Adelaide Writers’ Week over the sample period of exclusively First Nations authors—1976, 2004 and 2014—and four panels at the Melbourne Writers Festival where all members of a panel were First Nations authors—1988, 2002, 2013 and 2015. All these panels had a focus on First Nations heritage and writing (Table 4.3). While it is vital that these types of discussions are included at literary festivals and led by First Nations authors, it is perhaps telling that there are no exclusively First Nations author panels discussing ‘The Contemporary Novel’ (Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2006) or ‘How to Read a Poem’ (Melbourne Writers Festival, 2012). Again, there appears to be a ‘type’ of discussion that particular groups are deemed appropriate to conduct. I discussed this issue with First Nations author Anita Heiss (2018), who Table 4.3 All-first nations author panel discussion topics Year

Literary festival

Title of panel discussion

1976 1988 2002 2004 2013 2014 2015

Adelaide Writers’ Week Melbourne Writers Festival Melbourne Writers Festival Adelaide Writers’ Week Melbourne Writers Festival Adelaide Writers’ Week Melbourne Writers Festival

Race, Culture and Language Black Writing Indigenous Playwriting First Nations Writing First Nations Australian Writers First Nations Australian Writers’ Network Indigenous Writing Now

116

A. DANE

identified with the fact that First Nations authors were typically asked to engage with the subject of ‘First Nations writing’. She said: I’m always saying, ‘I want to talk about process. I want to talk about writing for an audience. I want to talk about research’ … But I think, sometimes also the content of that panel is really reflective of the content of what we’re writing about. So, that makes things together, because we’re writing issues that are relevant to our communities.

Heiss touches on the central tension of the criticism around panel discussions that I have raised here. While it is important that we have public discussions with writers and authors about gender, feminism and race, and discussions around First Nations writing with First Nations authors, challenging the underlying values around gender, race, authority and literary expertise is difficult if marginalised groups are not afforded the platform to discuss ‘process’, ‘writing for an audience’ and ‘research’ in a public forum. The Relationship Between Literary Festivals and Sales Performance Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival appear to have a stronger relationship to the marketplace than the book reviews in ABR, The Age and The Australian. Where around 2% of the authors who were reviewed in these publications were also among the highest-selling fiction, non-fiction and poetry authors, around 4% of those who appear in Adelaide Writers’ Week and Melbourne Writers Festival programs are also bestselling authors—Anita Heiss, Lily Brett, Hannah Kent and Michelle de Kretser, among them. Of these bestselling authors, around 62% of them are men and 38% are women. While this does go some way to support many of the criticisms directed at the legitimacy of writers festivals as consecratory institutions—that is, their ties to the marketplace—it is clear that the vast majority of writers’ festival participants are not among the highest-selling authors annually. It is important to acknowledge that it is not just authors who appear at writers’ festivals; critics, screenwriters, chefs, politicians and journalists are all regular features on the literary festival stage. However, other than this group of ‘non-authors’, who may have published a book but may not consider writing as their primary vocation, it is conceivable that the majority of authors at writers’ festivals possess more symbolic than economic capital in the field.

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

117

The Melbourne Writers Festival appears to have closer ties to the marketplace than Adelaide Writers Week: 45% of these bestselling authors featured in the Melbourne Writers Festival program, 36% appeared at both the Melbourne Writers Festival and Adelaide Writers Week, and 21% were involved with Adelaide Writers’ Week. The stronger connection that Melbourne has to the economic field aligns with Simone Murray’s (2012) ‘concentric circle’ understanding of the prestige attached to literary festivals and how it is tied to the type of festival and the program of events. The Adelaide Writers Week program tends to focus more on literary fiction, literary non-fiction and poetry, placing it, according to Murray’s model, in the centre or most symbolically rich circle. The Melbourne Writers Festival, on the other hand, has a broader range of events that include more than just literary authors and poets and is, therefore, part of the next, larger tier. That the Melbourne Writers Festival features more bestselling authors only serves to support this conception of the position the various festivals occupy in the field. The relationship between sales performance, gender and ‘in conversation’ events reinforces the unequitable and problematic relationship that these events have with gender. Around 10% of the authors involved in ‘in conversation’ events at the two sessions are also bestsellers. This is a greater proportion than the proportion of bestselling authors at the festivals as a whole, suggesting that the authors programmed at these events possess more economic capital and, therefore, occupy powerful positions in the contemporary Anglophone field where symbolic and economic capital come together. As a whole 65% of these authors— that is, those who are both bestsellers and panel participants—are men, 35% women. However, of the bestselling authors who are tasked with facilitating or moderating these conversations, 37% are men and 63% are women. Bestselling women authors are overwhelmingly represented as moderators of these kinds of discussions, echoing Charlotte Wood’s comments about how, as her reputation grows, she is ‘doing less of that kind of handmaideny stuff’. Doing less, perhaps, but not doing none. Beyond Gender: Institutional Barriers to Inclusive Festivals The programming of literary festivals is complex, involves multiple stakeholders and a number of competing interests. A primary function of the literary festival is the promotion of books and authors and literary festival programs are awash with authors who have a newly published title

118

A. DANE

to discuss. Publishing house publicity departments pitch their authors to festival programmers because the festival setting offers authors and publishers access to readers, the on-site festival bookstore, publicity and prestige. Therefore, what publishers are publishing can often dictate who is programmed in the festival. It is important, then, to interrogate the diversity of those in positions of power at both within literary festival programming and in publishing houses when we’re seeking to understand the issue of access and equity on the literary festival stage. The 2019 Shifting the Balance report into cultural diversity and leadership within the Australian creative sector (Diversity Arts Australia 2019) uncovers a ‘significant under-representation of CALD [culturally and linguistically diverse] people in leadership and decision-making roles in every area of the creative sector’ (Diversity Arts Australia 2019: 4). Results from the Shifting the Balance research shows that among the creative directors of events like literary festivals, and board members or organisations like the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Adelaide Festival (of which Adelaide Writers Week is a part), culturally and linguistically diverse individuals made up only 14 and 6% of the leadership roles respectively. Just 4% of the leadership roles among creative directors were occupied by First Nations people. Similarly, just 14% of leadership roles in the literature and publishing sector were occupied by culturally and linguistically diverse individuals, just 3% First Nations Australians. The Shifting the Balance report demonstrates the stronghold that white Australians have when it comes to the positions of power in the nation’s creative sector, a dominance that trickles down throughout the field and pervades the ways in which power, prestige and reputation are established and supported. Just 2% of the authors who appeared in the Adelaide Writers Week program from 1966 to 2015, and 2% of the authors who appeared in the Melbourne Writers Festival program from 1986 to 2015 were First Nations Australians, consistent with the 3% of First Nations leaders in literature and publishing uncovered by the Shifting the Balance report. Hiring First Nations arts sector managers into leadership positions at cultural institutions like literary festivals is likely to have a meaningful impact on the way that these events are programmed and, in turn, the profile of power and prestige in the literary field. In Chapter 2, I discussed the ways in which book reviews editors have historically failed to address the gender bias on the book review page and how short-lived efforts to address the gender gap often fall by the wayside. Transforming the field, and the ways in which power and prestige

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

119

is identified and conferred, takes considerable effort that appears to have been consistently absent from the editing of book review pages, and the programming discussions at Adelaide Writers Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival. The lack of First Nations representation on the literary festival stage is again emblematic of the reluctance of individuals who lead consecratory institutions to change and including First Nations people in all programming decisions is likely to increase First Nations participation and go some way to redefining and recontextualising systems by which prestige and power are accumulated. The issue of representation of traditionally marginalised authors goes beyond the position of white women in the literary field and this research demonstrates that when the profile of power is widened so to include some authors who have been traditionally marginalised, white women authors are the first and biggest beneficiaries. This can be seen with the analysis of Adelaide Writers Week and Melbourne Writers Festival programs: just one of the 59 women who delivered a keynote lecture at Adelaide Writers Week between 1966 and 2015, and five of the 88 women who delivered a keynote lecture between 1986 and 2015 were First Nations women. In the Shifting the Balance report Tim Soutphommasane, Co-Chair of the Screen Diversity and Inclusion Network, notes that ‘There is clearly much room for improvement. Structural barriers and cultural blind-spots do exist; time alone won’t deliver more diversity’ (Diversity Arts Australia 2019: 28). The historical analysis of these literary festival programs clearly demonstrates Soutphommasane’s observation and indicates that conscious and sustained action on the part of and among festival programming staff and within publishing houses is vital for progress.

Conclusions The literary festivals examined in this chapter are a synecdoche for the relationship between gender and prestige in the broader contemporary Australian literary field and, moreover, demonstrate the stronghold that traditional power-brokers have over the actions taken within the field. As Weber (2018: 13) notes, ‘literary festivals offer a fertile site for the study of the interests and power dynamics that structure the contemporary literary field’. Deeper examination of what initially appears to be a space where women authors are almost equally represented reveals a far more complex picture.

120

A. DANE

When considering the overall number of women authors featured in the Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival programs, the festival organisers appear to be conscious of the importance of the visibility or representation of women authors. Especially in the case of the Melbourne Writers Festival, the representation of women has been consistently high compared to other sites of prestige accumulation, such as book reviews or literary prizes, and more women than men have been featured in a number of years. The same can be said for Adelaide Writers’ Week in the last three decades or so. However, a closer reading of the way events at these festivals are programmed finds the habitus of individuals operating within Australia’s literary field is increasingly visible. The rigid set of characteristics or dispositions that regulate the structure and positions of power in the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993) is, perhaps, more apparent when analysing the literary festival programs. Katherine Bode (2008) and Julieanne Lamond (2011) have both observed that an essential feature of the habitus of Australia’s literary field is deep-rooted ideas about gender, importance and literary value. Transforming the structure of the literary field, and therefore these underlying characteristics, takes more than just an increase in the number of women represented in a space. The relatively high representation of women at Adelaide Writers’ Week and Melbourne Writers Festival is often merely superficial. Men make up the overwhelming majority of keynote speakers and they are more likely to be in the majority on a discussion panel. Where men are consistently more likely to be the focus of an author ‘in conversation’ event, women are consistently more likely to facilitate that discussion. And, perhaps most illuminating, looking at the topics covered by all-male or all-women panels, it appears that men are, perhaps unconsciously, considered far better equipped to discuss the serious business of literature and writing, and women authors are broadly understood to be experts on gender, sex, romance and family. This analysis of the literary festival program enables us to see the ways that gender and the field interact in a way that book reviews and literary prizes cannot. The literary festival is a space where agents from across the field, with varying degrees of accumulated symbolic and economic capital, come together to interact and perform literary culture. Where book reviews reveal the relationship between publication, reviewer and author, literary festivals bring everyone together to play out the literary field on a small and concentrated scale. Moreover, the festival program

4

CELEBRATION, PERFORMANCE AND AUTHORITY …

121

illuminates the limitations that have plagued efforts to increase the representation of women in particular sectors of the literary field. Introducing more women book reviewers at ABR, The Age and The Australian has not brought about significant and lasting equality at these publications, nor—as I will explore in Chapter 4—has increasing the number of women on literary prize juries had a knock-on effect to the number of women prize winners. The representation of women at writers’ festivals is, on the whole, strong; however, this strong representation is diluted by the hierarchy of events and roles within particular festivals. Transforming the relationship between gender, power and the literary festival requires more than simply increasing the number of women facilitating the discussion of men, their lives, and their work. Transformation requires a shift in the attitudes and customs that regulate the accumulation of symbolic capital. Studying literary festival programs shows that equality is not simply increasing the broad representation of a particular group if this increase means that the previously under-represented group is tasked with what Charlotte Wood calls the ‘handmaideny stuff’. One of the limitations of this study is the small sample of festivals studied. A more rigorous understanding of the relationship between gender and literary festivals could be achieved by increasing the number of festivals to include other prominent Australian literary events such as the Sydney and Brisbane Writers Festivals, the Emerging Writers’ Festival and the Newcastle Young Writers Festival. Extending the scope of study to include more festivals, and a greater diversity of events, would facilitate a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Moreover, in order to fully understand the complex relationship between literary festival programming and gender in Australia, questions raised in this chapter need to be applied to more festivals and to festival audiences. It would be valuable to speak to the predominantly women-identifying audiences about their perceptions of gender, authority and literary merit, as the audiences are perhaps the agents in the field of the literary festival that could influence a change in—or at least bring about a great awareness of—the gendered way the festivals are often programmed.

122

A. DANE

References Adelaide Festival (2018) Demographics. Available at: https://www.adelaidefest ival.com.au/demographics. Accessed 15 July 2018. AustLit (2017a) Data Extracted from Advanced Search of Database, Literary Titles Published 1965–2015. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. AustLit (2017b) About AustLit. Available at: https://www-austlit-edu-au.ezp. lib.unimelb.edu.au/about. Accessed 13 November 2018. Birmingham J (2010) How to Pull a Crowd. Australian Author, April: 12–15. Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Diversity Arts Australia (2019) Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity Within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors. Parramatta: University of Western Sydney. Dempster L (2018) Interview, 8 June. Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Heiss A (2018) Interview, 23 May. Lamond J (2011) Stella Versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia. Meanjin 70(3): 32–39. Lawson S (2005) Critical Absences. Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing, No. 4. Lurie C (2004) Festivals Inc. Australian Author 36(2): 8–12. Meehan M (2005) The World Made Flesh: Festival, Carnality and Literary Consumption. Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing, No. 4. Murray S (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge. Ommundsen W (2000) The Circus Is in Town: Literary Festivals and the Mapping of Cultural Heritage. In: de Groen F and Stewart K (eds) Australian Writing in the City. Sydney: The Association for the Study of Australian Literature, pp. 173–179. Ommundsen W (2009) Literary Festivals and Cultural Consumption. Australian Literary Studies 24(1): 19–34. Starke R (1998) Writers, Readers and Rebels: Upfront and Backstage at Australia’s Top Literary Festival. Kent Town: Wakefield Press. Stewart C (2013) The Rise and Rise of Writers’ Festivals. In: Harper G (ed) A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley, pp. 263–277. Weber M (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Hierarchies of Legitimacy: Gender and Literary Prizes

Literary prizes are the most visible agent of consecration in the contemporary literary field. And, similar to literary festivals, literary prizes are growing in both number and prominence in the Anglophone literary field. Prize judges are tasked with selecting just one winning title—or in some rare cases, joint winners—singling out one author as the author with the very best book according to an often vague set of criteria. Especially when it comes to the larger literary prizes, the winning author is exulted within and beyond the literary field, their accumulated symbolic capital and elevated writerly reputation on display. This display is often accompanied by champagne ceremonies, inspiring speeches and coverage in the arts section of daily newspapers. As an act of reputation building, winning a literary prize works to establish new constituencies for authors and their writing, constituencies that are often associated with economic capital. The study of literary prizes as agents of consecration provides a precise look into the ways in which contemporary standards of literary merit or value are established and maintained, helping to trace the origins and profile of national literary canons, and national literary tastes. This chapter draws upon a data set of seven major literary awards and seeks to uncover the rigid nature of literary prize-giving, and the ways in which unconscious actions serve to maintain long-established structures of literary power.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_5

123

124

A. DANE

Where scholars, literary critics and cultural journalists continue to grapple with the contemporary gender prize gap (see, for example, Flood 2015; Horn 2015; Lamond 2011; Zangen 2003), less consideration has been given to the history of this gender gap, the evolving relationship between gender and prizes, and how the inclusion and exclusion of different groups of authors, in the construction of shortlists and selection of the winner, is an act of symbolic violence that seeks to maintain traditional hierarchies of power in the literary field. Sharon Norris (2006) interrogates literary prizes as institutions where symbolic violence is essential to the way they function and notes that ‘those involved with this award, including judges, shortlisted authors and members of the management committee tend to be from a particular class’, and that this ‘calls into question whether the “best novel” is assessed on aesthetic grounds or in relation to social values’ (Norris 2006: 141). Building upon Bourdieu and Passeron’s articulation of symbolic violence and class—‘the process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder’ (1977: xiii)—Norris asserts that the Booker Prize, through this symbolic violence, maintains notions of ‘legitimate’ literary expression through the process of judging and awarding a literary prize by excluding individuals who are not from ‘a particular class’. I argue that notions of literary legitimacy have also been maintained along gender and racial lines, and that the awarding of literary prizes, as Bourdieu, English (2002, 2009) and Norris (2006) suggest, helps to protect deeply rooted perceptions of gender and cultural legitimacy. The analysis presented in this chapter explores this idea, asking whether interventions into the field—like the introduction of a literary prize for women—might threaten this status quo. As an agent of consecration, literary prizes facilitate an exchange of symbolic capital between judges and the shortlisted and winning authors. In a study of the status of literary prize judges, De Nooy (1988) examined the careers of the judges of major literary prizes and determined that the judges of the most prestigious prizes were likely to have an established, long-running career in the literary field with a well-regarded professional reputation (De Nooy 1988). Furthermore, the position each prize occupies in the field of cultural production is often thought to be closely associated with the position occupied by the individuals on the judging panel (English 2009). An exchange of symbolic capital, from prize to author, relies on the position that the members of the judging panel hold within the complex hierarchy of the field (Driscoll 2009; English 2002,

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

125

2009). The ‘production of belief’, which Bourdieu (1993: 42) identifies as a central process in the allocation of symbolic capital, is dependent on the status within the field of those tasked with distributing symbolic prestige and, therefore the understood ‘value’ of the cultural object. Norris (2006: 147) notes that judges are often sourced from universities, as: Academic judges potentially bring with them the legitimacy of the School, which has historically played a major role in the process of literary consecration.

Here Norris is acknowledging the exchange of capital between the judges, the shortlisted and winning authors and the institution of literary prizes, noting the need for a particular ‘class’ of judge to bring with them their own institutional legitimacy, and to select a particular type of winning title. English reiterates this idea, noting that the prestige—and consecrating power—of a prize depends on the agent’s belief in its ability to identify good literature, and in turn, to contribute to commonly held notions of literary merit and value. English (2009: 7) writes that literary prizes, as an institution, recognize, the high ideals and good faith of many of its participants, while also recognising that those ideals and that faith are themselves part of a social system of competitive transaction and exchange which prizes serve and by means of which all cultural value is produced.

English’s acknowledgement of the ‘social system’ in which ‘all cultural value is produced’—again building upon Bourdieu’s (1993: 35) ideas around the ‘production of belief’—is the symbolic violence associated with literary prizes, as Toil Moi (1991: 126) notes: ‘Taste or judgement are the heavy artillery of symbolic violence’. Whether one analyses the selection of authors as ‘prize worthy’ or not in relation to class—as Bourdieu and Norris explore—or in relation to gender, the process of judging literary prizes establishes and supports the dominance of one group over another. Describing the role of awards and prizes in the process of producing value in a cultural object, James English (2009: 51) states that, ‘institutionally, the prize functions as a claim to authority and … to produce cultural value’. In his study of cultural prizes, English (2009: 26) observes that the proliferation of prizes within the field of cultural production

126

A. DANE

represents ‘cultural practice in its quintessential contemporary form’. This assessment of the role of prizes in the literary field, as a public assertion of literary merit, is influenced by Bourdieu’s description of the overall struggle for legitimacy within the field of cultural production: a process to procure ‘the social signs of consecration’ (Bourdieu 1996: 123). As English (2002: 110) explains, the prize is to symbolic capital what money is to economic capital: that is, a strong signifier of said capital. Moreover, this assertion suggests prizes are a primary contributor to the symbolic capital of an agent in the field of cultural production. English’s description of the influence of literary prizes has all the hallmarks of a powerful cultural mediator and an agent of consecration. Squires (2004: 43–43) similarly recognizes the consecratory role of the literary prize, noting that prizes act ‘as gatekeepers and guardians of culture’ and ‘have a crucial role … in the continuing presence of certain texts in bookshops and libraries beyond the initial year of publication’. In the contemporary literary field, prizes represent—or at least are seen by other agents in the field as representing—a major source of symbolic capital for authors. Moreover, the life cycle of influence that is attached to the literary prize is long and the effects of the symbolic capital associated with winning are far reaching; Stevie Marsden and Claire Squires (2019: 1) observe the ways in which literary prizes ‘contribute to the early stages of canon formation’. Elsewhere, Squires (2013: 299) articulates the far-reaching influence of literary prizes, noting that ‘given the literary and financial currency that a big award can confer on a writer, the next novel from a Booker Prize winner, for example, will affect the whole of the publishing value chain, including the initial decision to publish’. Here we can see the top-down influence of the literary prize over not just one author’s reputation but the entire literary field; from the titles that are considered for publication, through to speculations around the imaginary literary canon. It has been argued that within a Bourdieusian framework, the consecratory status of literary prizes to bestow symbolic capital is destabilized by their association with less autonomous parts of the field of cultural production such as the marketplace and sponsors (Norris 2006), or with the media and prize money (English 2009). In the contemporary Anglophone field, however, power is situated in the space where prestige and reputation meet financial viability, both symbolic and economic capital. In terms of literary prizes, this economic capital comes in two forms: prize money and a potential increase in title sales that comes off the back of being shortlisted for or winning a literary prize (Allen and Driscoll 2013;

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

127

Squires 2013). The connection between prize judges’ identification of prize-winning writing—and, therefore, acquisition of symbolic capital— and the strengthened commercial position that literary prizes can instil, is an essential feature of the structure of power in the literary field. Therefore, to claim that the proliferation of literary prizes is emblematic of the increasing commercialisation and market-focused structure of the field is to perhaps misunderstand the contemporary nature and function of symbolic capital. Moreover, significant accumulated symbolic capital will, over time, influence an author’s economic capital. Marie-Pierre Pouly (2016: 1) echoes this notion in her study of the ‘literary bestseller’, writing: The world of publishing relies heavily on the accumulation of symbolic capital and on the creation of belief in the value of cultural goods … In the most prestigious areas of the literary field, symbolic and economic capital work together.

The explicit connections that literary prizes make between symbolic and economic rewards exemplify their influence in the literary field, and the importance of understanding who is and is not afforded access to the power they convey. The changing nature of the field of cultural production—from a site occupied by agents of consecration to a place populated with agents who have a dual function as both consecrators within the field and as cultural intermediaries outside the field—is further emphasised by the role that the news media play in the production of belief in the power of prizes to contribute to and amplify symbolic and cultural capital. The news media have played a significant role in the popularisation and proliferation of literary prizes and they are often reported on in the news media when awarded, and in relation to a recipient in perpetuity (English 2009). The news media and arts sector journalists also play a role in the cultural weight given to literary prizes; the media coverage of literary prizes by cultural critics, journalists and commentators indicates that these awards denote cultural value, reinforcing this idea with every piece of news coverage. English (2009: 21) attributes, at least in part, the far-reaching influence of literary prizes on an author’s reputation to the way journalists write about prize-winning authors, noting:

128

A. DANE

It is almost as though winning a prize is the only newsworthy thing a cultural worker can do, the one thing that really counts in a lifetime of more or less nonassessable, indescribably or at least unreportable cultural accomplishments.

It is perhaps for this reason that the symbolic violence enacted in the adjudication of literary prizes, performed in the pursuit of symbolic capital exchange, is most acute. In the media coverage of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, journalists reporting on the announcement of shortlists and winners often refer to the symbolic or prestigious status of the prize. In 1975, 18 years after the prize was established, a story in The Canberra Times described the prize as ‘one of Australia’s top literary awards’ (The Canberra Times 1975: 7). In 1997, journalist Lynne Cossar called the prize ‘the country’s most coveted literary prize’ (Cossar 1997). Since then, the Miles Franklin Literary Award has been described by the news media as the ‘most prestigious’ (Clark 1998), the ‘most respected’ (Steger 2002), the ‘most significant’ (Nancarrow 2012) and the ‘most important’ (Romei 2015) literary prize in Australia. Such proclamations of importance can serve to reinforce the perception of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and literary prizes more broadly, both within and outside the field of cultural production. However, prizes—and the prestige they attract and distribute—do not exist in isolation, nor does belief in their position in the hierarchy of the literary field go unchallenged. Much of the criticism levelled at the place and role of prizes within the literary field is rooted in the relationships that prizes have developed outside the field of cultural production. Prizes are not simply a tool for the allocation of symbolic capital; there are often significant cash rewards attached to the major prizes and for some prizes there can be an associated boost in sales when a title is shortlisted for and wins a major award. Authors often cite prize money, and other ancillary financial benefits, as the primary reason why they engage with prize culture. For the majority of authors in the Australian field, living on an income from writing alone is nearly impossible so prize money goes a long way. The combination of symbolic and economic rewards can deepen the effects of the symbolic violence associated with literary prizes: those who are not afforded equal access to the capital connected to literary prizes are not only excluded from the legitimacy that comes with winning, but also excluded from the financial support

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

129

provided by prize money. Author Jennifer Down (2018) spoke about the effect that prize money could have: But the prize money for that is exactly the same figure as my annual salary … I can’t pretend it wouldn’t matter. Like, I would literally double my annual income.

The proliferation of prizes within the literary field has coincided with an apparent competition among the prizes to award the highest sum to the winning author. And while some argue that a pure Bourdieusian analysis may stipulate that the symbolic clout of literary prizes would be diminished by this relationship with economic capital, the awarding of cash is essential to the viability of the prize in today’s precarious publishing climate. The fact that prizes bring together symbolic, cultural and economic capital so effortlessly ensures their prominence both within and outside of the field of cultural production. This is, once again, demonstrated by the news media coverage of Australia’s ‘most prestigious’ literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award: since 1965, reporting on the activities surrounding the prize often includes detail of the prize money offered, explicitly linking the prestige of the prize with the cash prize it offers. Throughout the award’s history, the Miles has been described by journalists and commentators as ‘Australia’s richest and most prestigious book prize’ (Steger 2000) and when a state Premier’s literary awards upped their prize offering, one news story noted that, ‘In giving its winner $42,000, the Miles Franklin Literary Award may no longer be Australia’s richest prize but it remains the most significant’ (Steger 2009) (Table 5.1). The prize money for the Miles has increased well beyond the rate of inflation. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (2018), if the prize money for the Miles had simply increased with inflation, the prize money would now stand at around $12,400. Instead, it is now more than four times that amount, and the amount of prize money has increased quite dramatically in the past 20 or so years, alongside the increasing prevalence of prizes in the Australian literary field that offers significant cash rewards. Together the symbolic and economic returns for the winners of literary prizes increase, securing the gap between the dominant and the dominated. Authors who win not only benefit from the reputational rewards, the prize money associated often helps to fund their careers, ensuring that they are able to publish more books. Moreover, the relationship between

130

A. DANE

Table 5.1 Miles Franklin Literary Award prize money, 1965–2015

Year

Prize money

1966–1969 1970–1973 1974–1975 1976–1977 1978 1979–1980 1981 1982–1983 1984 1985 1986 1987–1988 1989 1990 1991 1992–1996 1997–1998 1999–2004 2004–2010 2011–2012 2013–2015

$1000 $1250 $1500 $1750 $2000 $2250 $3000 $3500 $5000 $6000 $7000 $8000 $10,000 $15,000 $20,000 $25,000 $27,000 $28,000 $42,000 $50,000 $60,000

Source Fitzpatrick (2013), Heseltine (2001), Steger (2000, 2004), and Romei (2011)

the symbolic capital that the award brings, and the economic capital the cash prize provides, continues to be reinforced both inside and outside the field of cultural production, as literary awards compete to become the ‘richest’ and the news media ensure we don’t forget the cash at stake when a winner is announced. Political involvement in literary prizes is a prominent and particular feature of the Australian literary field. Each Australian state has a Premier’s Award for literature and, since 2008, Australia has also had a Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Unlike the Miles Franklin Award, which is funded by a trust established from the estate of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, the Premier’s Literary Awards establish an explicit tie between the accumulation of symbolic capital and the political field. In the majority of cases—with the Prime Minister’s Literary Award being the most notable exception—the influence of politics on the award is mitigated through the independent (and expert) judging panel and administrators who

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

131

are one step removed from government departments: for example, the State Library of NSW oversees the administration of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne oversees the administration of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Despite the independence of the judging panel, prizes such as the Premier’s and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards may represent an attempt by the state to be involved in the determining of cultural value (English 2009), or, on the other hand, provide much-needed support for the production of literature in an under-resourced field. Furthermore, awarding literary prizes allows the state to enter the exchange of symbolic capital, as Susan Lever (1997: 105) notes: On the one hand, writers who are rewarded with government prizes … may be seen as being publicly endorsed as the finest in the country. On the other, the governments making the award (or, at least, the individual politicians associated with that government) do so because they wish to appear cultivated and civilized.

The complexity of this relationship—between government-funded prize and prize-winning author—was never more evident than the awarding of the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, as part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, to Behrouz Boochani for No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador, 2018). At the time the prize was awarded Boochani, an Iranian-Kurdish journalist and asylum seeker, was detained on Manus Island in line with the asylum seeker policy enacted by the successive Labour and Coalition governments’. Boochani, who has a growing reputation as both a journalist and a literary figure in Australia, was deemed eligible for the award by the independent administrators and judging panel (the prize is usually only open to Australian citizens and residents) but it was the Victorian Labour Minister for Creative Industries Martin Foley who awarded the $125,000 prize to Boochani—via video link—and translator Omid Tofighian, establishing an explicit symbolic connection between the Victorian State Government, No Friend But the Mountains and Boochani. The judging panel and the Wheeler Centre made the decision, but due to the nature of State-sponsored literary awards, the government of the day were able to bask in the reflected glory of this widely applauded move, without having to make any statements regarding the continuing refugee policy.

132

A. DANE

Comparing state and corporate sponsorship in the British literary field, Norris (2006) identifies the difference between the two: that within a Bourdieusian framework, state-sponsored literary awards are seen as a ‘necessary evil’ of the field. Similarly, Lever (1997) identifies the necessity of state sponsorship of the literary arts, noting that the alternative is a field where authors are ‘thrown into the marketplace where evaluation occurs in terms of straightforward sales figures’ (Lever 1997). Moreover, in her study of the sponsorship structure of the Booker Prize, Norris (2006: 144) explores the notion of the exchange of symbolic and cultural capital between the judges, winning authors and corporate sponsorship, noting that this arrangement enables the sponsor to appear ‘cultural’. Despite the possible motives of political agents in the awarding of literary prizes, the status and prevalence of state-sponsored awards in Australia’s literary field, as institutions with high levels of symbolic capital and significant cash prizes, means that they are understood as important markers of prestige. The perceived importance of the state literary awards is, perhaps, enough to ensure their ability to confer symbolic capital and as literary publicist Alice Lewinsky (2016) notes, ‘The Victorian Prem’s and the NSW Prem’s do have that prestige factor’.

Gender and Literary Prizes The longstanding and difficult relationship between gender and literary prizes has attracted increased scrutiny since the announcement of all-male Miles Franklin Award shortlists in 2009 and in 2011. Many prominent members of Australia’s publishing field have acknowledged the ‘gender gap’ in the awarding of literary prizes (see Cunningham 2011; Lamond 2011): conversations that, in part, led to the establishment of the women-only Stella Prize. The Stella Prize, first awarded in 2013, is a ‘major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing’ that seeks to ‘recognise and celebrate Australian women writers’ contribution to literature’ (Stella Prize 2018). The prize, named after Stella ‘Miles’ Franklin, awards one woman writer of fiction or non-fiction $50,000 that, according to the Prize’s website: buys a writer some measure of financial independence and thus time, that most undervalued yet necessary commodity for women, to focus on their writing. (Stella Prize 2018)

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

133

This transparent acknowledgement of the combination of symbolic and economic capital, and what this capital provides to authors, is an interventionist act that serves to address the symbolic violence against women writers that exists in the awarding of literary prizes in the literary field. Marysa Demoor et al. (2008) studied the literary prize gender gap in the Flemish literary field and found that men won the overwhelming majority of adult trade literary prizes. Their research also recognised that a small group of members of the Flemish field held considerable power, observing, ‘the appearance of the same judges over and over again, in different juries over a long period of time’ (Demoor et al. 2008: 34). In what could be described as the self-fulfilling cycle of symbolic violence, the researchers offer a possible explanation for the reason why this gender gap is so difficult to close. They write, ‘a literary text is embedded in a complex framework of structures in which the established power groups decide what constitutes “literature”’ (Demoor et al. 2008: 32). The situation is such that, when it comes to the literary prize-giving culture, the framework within which the aesthetic properties of ‘literature’ is assessed has developed, with the aid of a revolving cast of powerful actors, a particular profile that pervades the broader perception of literary merit and value. From the findings presented by Demoor et al. (2008), we can see that authors operating within this system do not experience equal access to this framework. In Australia, a number of authors and publishers, including Helen Garner, Louise Swinn, Sophie Cunningham and Kate Grenville, have expressed their support for a prize for women’s writing and for the Stella Prize’s guiding principles: to celebrate women’s writing and champion cultural change (Stella Prize 2018). Disrupting the systems wherein the women experience limited access to the prestige attached to winning a literary prize sits at the core of these principles. Support for the Stella Prize has not, however, been universal. Journalist Nicole Flint and author Sonya Hartnett both expressed their disapproval of a gendered literary prize. Flint (2014) contends that the Stella Prize sends a ‘harmful’ message to women that they are ‘incapable’ of competing with male authors, and that the Miles Franklin Award is a prize that is judged purely on merit and ability. Author Sonya Hartnett expressed her distaste for the Stella Prize, implying that it is not a prize she has any desire to win (Romei 2014). This recalls the controversy surrounding the introduction of Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction in 1996 (formerly known as the Orange Prize and the Baileys Prize). Scholar Britta Zangen investigated

134

A. DANE

the backlash against the prize, noting that authors Anita Brookner, A S Byatt and Kingsley Amis—all winners of the Booker Prize—disputed the need for, and the value of, a women-only literary award (Zangen 2003: 282–283). Amis is reported to have said, ‘One can hardly take the winner of this seriously’ (Zangen 2003: 283). These comments speak to perceptions around the relationship between literary merit and gender that sit below the surface of the literary field, and Zangen’s research highlights a range of attitudes that existed in relation to ‘women’s writing’ at the time, and exist still. While there was support for the prize, critics of the award cited concerns that the prize may ‘ghettoise’ women’s writing, and many individuals within Britain’s literary field proclaimed that the reason not many women had won the Booker Prize was because they didn’t write as many good books as men (Zangen 2003: 285). The Women’s Prize for Fiction has subsequently established itself as a prize with considerable symbolic clout: many of the shortlisted and winning titles of the Prize have won or been shortlisted for other major awards (the Booker and Goldsmiths Prize among them), and research shows that winning the prize can have a significant effect on sales performance (O’Brien 2016). This ‘clout’ sits in opposition to the criticisms expressed by Brookner, Byatt and Amis and suggests that the ‘quality’ of women’s writing might not be the reason why, in 2018, just 32% of the winning titles of the Booker Prize were written by women. The reaction to the introduction of the Women’s Prize For Fiction illustrates the perception of women and their writing in the Anglophone literary field. Writing on the value and necessity of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 20 years after it was introduced, author Zoe Heller (Heller and Stevens 2015) laments the existence of the prize, saying: The Baileys Prize gives money and brings public attention to worthy writers, but it does so at the risk of institutionalizing women’s secondclass, junior-league status … there’s no doubt that I would be definitely happier to win a contest that included male entrants.

The film critic Dana Stevens (Heller and Stevens 2015), writing in the same op-ed as Heller, notes the ‘essentialist logic’ that lies at the heart of women-only prizes, while at the same time acknowledging that we are not yet in a place where women write in a purely egalitarian field. Stevens underscores her point by quoting a letter that Charlotte Brontë—who

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

135

wrote Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell—penned in response to an essay about Jane Eyre that questioned Brontë’s gender: To you I am neither Man or Woman—I come before you as Author only— it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgement.

Brontë’s assertion, while true, perhaps overlooks the gendered ways in which critics and prize judges read and understand literary texts. Whether or not one supports the central tenet of women-only literary prizes such as the Stella or the Women’s Prize for fiction, critics and supporters tend to agree that women authors are continually disavowed by the broad systems of cultural prize-giving. The introduction of the Stella Prize has renewed the attention given to the relationship between gender and literary prizes in Australian book publishing, as well as the way a prize may function to influence other agents in the literary field. Reflecting on Brontë’s letter to her critics gives rise to questions around whether literary prizes are judged on literary merit alone. In an essay examining the gendered nature of literary prize-giving in Australia, Natalie Kon-Yu (2016) echoes Brontë, writing that literary merit might not be the primary criteria guiding the awarding of prizes. She states, ‘The interesting question is not whether men and women write differently, but rather how men’s and women’s work are read differently’. The analysis presented in this chapter would suggest that while judges cling to egalitarian ideals, the aesthetic properties of a title are not the only values that contribute to the judging of a literary prize. However, hiding behind notions of literary merit help judges to perform the symbolic violence that lies at the heart of the process of awarding a literary prize. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977: 4) write: Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations.

Can interventions such as the Stella Prize, and their transparent approach to the value and influence of the symbolic and economic capital attached to prize winning, influence a similar transparency in the way that gender intersects with perceptions around literary merit and cultural value?

136

A. DANE

When considering the transformative possibilities of a women’s literary prize, the ways in which white women in the Anglophone field have benefitted from efforts such as the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Stella Prize cannot be overlooked. Examining the history of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK illustrates the ways in which the operation of the literary prize, through the goal of identifying literary power, emulates the broader literary field in a slightly reconfigured manner. Over the 24 year history of the Women’s prize, 80% of the winners have been white women, and just five women of colour have been awarded the prize. And while the Stella Prize in Australia has a much shorter history than the Women’s Prize in the UK, seven of the eight Stella Prizes have been awarded to white women: First Nations author Alexis Wright won the award in 2018 for Tracker (Giramondo Publishing, 2017). Instead of subverting hierarchies of power, women’s literary prizes often reinforce them, and while this is most evident in the study of the history of contemporary literary prizes, it is a phenomenon that is replicated throughout the various institutions in the literary field and any progress towards equality between men and women in the field is afforded predominantly to white women. Judging Literary Quality In an examination of the ‘Modes of consecration in the literary field’, Gisèle Sapiro (2016) explores the notion that literary quality is articulated through the awarding of prestigious literary prizes, attention from literary critics and interaction with festivals and academe. These are the institutions that ‘assess the value of artwork according to specific aesthetic criteria, as opposed to reductive heteronomous criteria such as ideological or economic considerations’ (Sapiro 2015: 2). By clinging to notions of ‘aesthetics’ in the judging of literary prizes—as opposed to broad popularity, marketplace viability, gender or race—judges are able to conceal the way that power and established hierarchy play into these judgements, as Bourdieu and Passeron observe. Literary prizes, ‘invoke the authority to intervene outside pre-existing market data which might demarcate a cultural product’s value, such as sales’ (Marsden and Smith 2019: 2) There are those who question the ability of prize judges to determine the best book or the most talented author in a particular year. Some contend that a ‘particular type’ of book is more likely to win a particular literary award (Kon-Yu 2016), while others assert that there are many

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

137

factors, in addition to the quality of a work, that may contribute to the awarding of a prize (Bode and Murphy 2014). Critic and novelist David Free (2009) notes that the judging process of a literary award does not always arrive at that year’s most talented writer. Free contends that awards would select the best work of fiction more regularly if they decided to pick ‘the prize-winner’s name out of a hat’ (Free 2009: n.p.). While Free may question the ability of a judging panel to determine the best book, which is a task cloaked in subjectivity, Free’s argument ignores the body of research that explores the established consecrating power of literary prizes (see Alan and Driscoll 2013; English 2009; Sapiro 2016; Squires 2013). Whether one agrees with the judges’ selection or not, the symbolic capital exchange, and concurrent symbolic violence, that occurs between the judges and the named authors is clear. While acknowledging the consecrating power of literary prizes, there are a number of authors, critics and commentators who continue to take a sceptical view of the judging process. John Street (2005) examined the various methods that prize juries adopted to pick a winning author, arguing that despite popular belief that the process of selecting the best book from a shortlist is arbitrary, this is, in fact, a carefully executed process. Street argues that the power of cultural prizes to shape both popular and critical tastes is an essential consideration in the adjudication of a literary prize. In his survey of the different methods used by judging panels, Street (2005: 833) notes that when a winner is selected based upon a majority decision among the judges, it is not always the ‘best’ book that wins, but rather the book that all the judges can agree upon. Other judging methods include a system in which some judges would push for a title that does not align with the consensus, advocating for a particular type of book to win, despite disagreement among the judges. This advocacy, Street (2005) argues, is most often successful when the judge who is pushing for a particular decision holds a significant amount of cultural and symbolic capital: capital that can help them to persuade the other judges. With this method, it is easy to see how powerful agents in the literary field help to shape, and perpetuate, perceptions of what is considered valuable. Street (2005: 838) concludes that the mode by which a jury reaches a decision will influence the type of book that wins. Moreover, Street is keen to emphasise that the books that are chosen as winners will influence the broader understanding, both within and outside of the field, of what ‘Literature’ is and is not, echoing Bourdieu’s (1993, 1996) articulation of the power of consecratory institutions to define

138

A. DANE

and prescribe legitimacy, to reinforce the belief in the value of a cultural product and shape cultural taste. Titles in the Running It is important to acknowledge the processes that are associated with the awarding of a literary prizes, and the symbolic violence associated with each step in the process: the longlist, shortlist and winner are most commonly selected from the titles that publishers put forward for consideration. The guidelines for submitting titles for consideration for the Miles Franklin, Victorian Premier’s and NSW Premier’s literary awards are full of opportunities for publishers to exclude women and authors from marginalised groups, albeit unconsciously. First, there is an entry fee for each title that is submitted to each prize, ranging from $75 to $100 for each entry (Miles Franklin Literary Award 2017; NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2016; The Wheeler Centre 2017), and for each title and each prize between five and seven copies of the text must be provided to the prize administrators. This places a significant financial burden on publishers: it has been reported that some publishers are spending thousands of dollars every year on entry fees to literary prizes (Wyndham 2016). And while this might not seem like a particularly burdensome figure for the likes of Penguin Random House or HarperCollins, for the small presses this can be a large proportion of their running costs. In addition, throughout the history of the Miles Franklin Award limits have been placed on the number of submissions from each publisher, often put at three titles per publisher per year (Heseltine 2001: 42). This means that, even for the awards where there is not a set limit on the number of titles a publisher can enter, many publishers are required to pick titles that are to be put forward for the major awards and, thus, the titles that miss out. There is a process in place at the Miles Franklin Award where judges can ‘call for books which they consider eligible, but which have not been submitted by publishers’ (Miles Franklin Literary Award 2017). Former Miles Franklin judge and editor of Australian Book Review, Peter Rose, recalled a time when the judges called for a title that had not been submitted by the publishers: ‘One year I was in the Miles, we did call for a book that hadn’t been submitted, Thea Astley’s Drylands ’. Drylands was judged the joint winner in 2000 with Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart. Thea Astley had, by 2000, already won three Miles Franklin awards, yet the publisher, Penguin, did not put Drylands forward. While

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

139

this ultimately worked out well for Astley—who, admittedly, already carried significant symbolic capital—it raises questions around the other authors that publishers may have overlooked in the process. It is not clear whether the state Premier’s literary awards adopt a similar policy; however, it is clear that publishers play a role in the inclusion and exclusion of particular groups when it comes to the awarding of literary prizes.

A Study of Gender and Australian Literary Prizes Little scholarly attention has been paid to the history of the Miles Franklin Literary Award or the prize’s impact on the Australian literary field; this is especially surprising as it is so often described as the ‘most significant’ prize in the crowded Australian prize-giving scene. Scholar and long-time Miles Franklin judge Henry Heseltine wrote a brief history of the award and his involvement as a member of the judging panel. In addition to Heseltine’s The Most Glittering Prize: The Miles Franklin Award, 1957 – 1998, there have been essays written about the criteria for the award (see Allington 2011; Free 2009) and studies discussing the gender imbalance of the shortlisted and winning authors (see Lamond 2011; Cunningham 2011). There has not, however, been a detailed quantitative analysis examining the way symbolic capital has been distributed through the prize over half a century. Established in 1957 from the estate of author Stella Miles Franklin to ‘give incentive to authors and provide them with additional monetary amounts’, the award was designed to reward an author ‘for the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit’ in addition to representing ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ (Heseltine 2001). This definition has caused some consternation among judges and authors and has often been the basis for dispute. Over the history of the prize, the judges’ interpretation of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ has evolved, despite the common criticism that the winners are overwhelmingly narratives about ‘blokes, the past, the bush’ (Lamond 2011). Similarly, Patrick Allington’s 2011 survey of the Miles Franklin Award winners shows a tendency to reward narratives that are predominantly ‘historical, rural, Anglo and male’. The most significant criticism of the possibly rigid criterion is that, as Allington (2011) observes, ‘it puts “Australia” ahead of literature. On this level, it is no different from any other officially-sanctioned prize coming out of more repressive societies’. Despite this critique, the Miles

140

A. DANE

Franklin Literary Award remains Australia’s pre-eminent literary prize, a position those who administer the award have worked hard to establish and maintain. The symbiotic relationship between literary prizes and the news media is never more evident, at least in the Australian context, than when considering the Miles Franklin Award. Across its history, the press has helped establish the Miles’ reputation as the ‘most prestigious’ literary prize in Australia, and controversies like Frank Moorhouse’s public disqualification in 1994 (his novel Grand Days was not regarded as sufficiently ‘Australian’ by the judging panel) serve to reinforce its place in the field. Scandals related to the prize not only give the press something to report on, but also provide a platform for the prize to reinforce its position and the literary values it claims to promote (Driscoll 2014). Following the Frank Moorhouse controversy, and subsequent media coverage, submissions to the award from publishers ‘skyrocketed’ (Heseltine 2001). But the labelling of Moorhouse’s Grand Days as ‘un-Australian’ (Wyndham 2004) is not the only Miles Franklin Award scandal that served to raise the profile and popularity of the prize. The awarding of the 1995 prize to Helen Demidenko for The Hand that Signed the Paper, and the 2004 judges ‘storm out’ (Wyndham 2004) have also presented the prize’s trustees, and the literary media, with opportunities to reassert the place that the Miles holds in Australian literary culture. The press coverage also played a role in the decision to introduce published shortlists in 1987, following the successful implementation of shortlists for the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom (Heseltine 2001). Selecting and making shortlists public allowed more publicity to be generated for the prize, as well as the opportunity for the titles under consideration to accumulate symbolic capital. The prestigious position that the Miles Franklin Award holds in Australia’s literary field is a culmination of history, the position of the individuals on the judging panel, prize money and the position of the authors who have won this top prize. The exchange of symbolic capital between the prize-winning author and the prize itself continues long after the award ceremony. Throughout Heseltine’s history of the Miles Franklin, he continually refers to the role that previous winners of the Miles Franklin play in establishing its legitimacy. He writes: By 1985 … there was scarcely a name on their list of winners not accorded a significant measure of critical respect and popular acclaim.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

141

Almost thirty years after its establishment, the Miles Franklin Literary Award was firmly established as one of the most important and distinctive features in Australia’s literary landscape.

Heseltine also includes a quote from Tim Winton after he won the 1992 Miles Franklin for Cloudstreet, which illustrates this: The nice thing about the Miles Franklin, for me, is that the books that win are enduring. It is more than a literary fashion parade.

These testimonies about the award illustrate how powerful the exchange of symbolic capital can be not only from the prize and the author but also from authors to the prize. Moreover, Winton’s testimony illustrates the way that prize-winning titles often come to define broad understandings of literary merit. Like the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards have not been the subject of significant scholarship. There is very little analysis of the distribution of symbolic capital from the prize or the position the prize occupies in the field. Despite this lack of attention, the two sets of prizes both hold a powerful position in the literary field as agents that ‘publicly endorse’ works and authors (Lever 1997), and are accompanied by a significant cash reward. These statesponsored prizes, however, differ from the Miles Franklin, especially when it comes to their motivations and aims. Founded in 1979, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were the first state Premier’s literary prizes awarded in Australia. It appears that the exchange of symbolic capital between author and award was keenly understood by those who established the prize, naming each award—for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature and young adult literature—after prominent authors from NSW: the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry are included as part of this study. The awards ‘have a proud history … helping to establish values and standards in Australian literature’ (NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2018). Moreover, the awards aim to ‘contribute to Australia’s artistic reputation and draw international attention to some of our best writers’ (NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2018). The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were established in 1985 ‘to honour and reward literary achievement by

142

A. DANE

Australia’s best writers’ and to ‘advance the Victorian community’s appreciation of Australian literature’ (The Wheeler Centre 2018). Like their NSW counterpart, the Victorian awards attached prestigious literary names to their prizes—the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction and the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry—but abandoned these appellations in 2010 for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. While all these prizes aim to reward authors for excellent writing, there is a distinct difference between the motivations for the Miles Franklin Award and the state-sponsored prizes. Franklin set out her intentions for the prize in her will, stating that the prize is designed to support Australian authors. Franklin’s will illustrates the differences between what an author, or someone who operates within the literary field, thinks is important in a prize, and what a government, or someone who operates outside the literary field, thinks is important in a prize. Franklin’s bequest is grounded in support for her peers whereas the Premier’s Literary Awards adopt an understandably more civic approach to the exercise: using the benefit to the public as the foundation of the prize. The specific aims of the NSW and Victorian Premier’s awards reveal an appreciation of the prestige-building role that prizes play, both as agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries.

Notes on Method Descriptive demographic data was collected from the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Douglas Stewart Prize for NonFiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. For each of these awards I noted the year, name of the author—both the prize winner and the shortlisted authors where available—the title of the winning book, the title of the shortlisted work— where applicable and available—the gender of the winning and shortlisted authors and if the winning or shortlisted author is a First Nations author, and, where available, the judges of the prizes. This data has provided a rich picture of who has accumulated symbolic capital from literary prizes over the last 50 years.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

143

The descriptive demographic data collected and analysed from the Miles Franklin Literary Award covers the period 1965 to 2015, other than the years 1973, 1983 and 1988 when there was no prize awarded due to the fact that the judging panel did not deem any entry a worthy winner (Heseltine 2001). In 1987, the judges of the Award began publishing shortlists in the run-up to the announcement of the winner; data from 1987 to 2015 (excluding 1988) have been collected and analysed. This data has been extracted from the AustLit database and the Miles Franklin Literary Award website. Demographic data has also been collected from the judging panels of the Miles Franklin Award over its history. Henry Heseltine’s The Most Glittering Prize provided a list of all the judges from 1957 to 1998 and the 1999 to 2015 judging panels were accessed through the previous versions of the Miles Franklin Literary Award websites that have been preserved by the Pandora Web Archive. The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, under which the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry are administered, were established in 1979 and descriptive demographic data from the winning works has been collected for these years—except for 1987 and 1998, when there was no award. This data has been extracted from the AustLit database. A consistent and reliable record of shortlisted works for all three awards is only available from 2000; therefore, data has only been collected for these years, extracted from the AustLit database and records provided by Arts NSW. The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, under which the Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry prize are awarded, were first awarded in 1985 and data from the winners of these prizes have been collected for the years 1985–2015, except for 2013 when the prize was not awarded because of an administrative reshuffle. As with the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, a complete and reliable source of shortlisted works is unavailable so descriptive demographic data from the shortlisted authors has been collected for the years 1995–2015. This data has been collected from the AustLit database and from records retained by the State Library of Victoria from the period it oversaw the administration of the prize from 1995 to 2009, and the Wheeler Centre for the years 2010–2015. State Library of Victoria records also include the judging panels from 1985 to 2009 and data has been collected from these lists. The lists of judges for the awards for the years 2011 and 2014 were accessed from the Wheeler Centre’s

144

A. DANE

Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards web pages; judging panels for 2010, 2014 and 2015 were obtained from the Wheeler Centre’s records. Efforts were made to obtain the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlists for the years prior to 2000 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlists for the years prior to 1995: these efforts included correspondence with the State Library of NSW, Arts NSW, NSW State Records office, Creative Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and an examination of the 1985–2000 Victorian Arts Ministers’ correspondence archived at the Victorian Public Record Office. However, there does not appear to be an established and complete archive of material relating to these statesponsored literary awards. Data that was collected, however, reveals a comprehensive picture of the way literary prizes act as agents of consecration in the literary field and how the distribution of prestige through literary prizes interacts with the gender of the author.

Prize-Winning Authors Men dominate the lists of winners of all seven awards. On the whole, authors have not, over the last three-to-five decades, enjoyed the benefits of the symbolic and economic capital that these literary prizes carry to anything like the same extent as men (Figs. 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3). Of the 49 winners of the Miles Franklin Award across the 1965– 2015 period, 35 (71%) were men and 14 (29%) were women. Similarly, 70% (21) of the winning titles in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction were written by men, and 30% (9) were written by women.

Fig. 5.1 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1965–2015

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

145

Fig. 5.2 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 1979–2015

Fig. 5.3 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, 1985–2015

Women authors have had more success in the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, wherein books written by women have won 39% of the awards, and 61% of the winners were books written by men; however, as with the Miles Franklin and Premier’s Literary Award, men still overrun the winners list. Similarly, where the non-fiction prizes are concerned—the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction—books by men are much more commonly recognised (Figs. 5.4 and 5.5). The list of Victorian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction winners, when compared to the fiction winners, demonstrates the durability of the systems of perception and value that are perpetuated by the symbolic violence of literary prizes. The Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction was presented to 30 authors over the period studied, 70% (21) of them men, and 30% (9) women. Forty-two authors received the

146

A. DANE

Fig. 5.4 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, 1979–2015

Fig. 5.5 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 1985–2015

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction over the 1979–2015 period— there were four years when the Prize was given to two authors—62% (26) of them men and 36% (16) women. Like the Christina Stead Prize, the Douglas Stewart Prize appears to afford greater access to symbolic capital for women than the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards; however, the gender gap between winners is still present. Poetry is a genre where, when it comes to the awarding of literary prizes, the gender gap appears to have closed, raising questions around this literary form and the overarching values of literary merit and gender that pervade the process of judging a prize. Looking at the proportion of women poets who have won the poetry prizes across the period shows a markedly different picture of the fiction and non-fiction prizes analysed (Figs. 5.6 and 5.7). Seventeen winners of the Kenneth Slessor prize (48%) have been works of poetry written by women and 19 (52%) were written by men. Seventeen (53%) of the winners of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Poetry were written by women, and 15 (47%) written by men. The Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Poetry is the only prize in this study

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

147

Fig. 5.6 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, 1980–2015

Fig. 5.7 Gender breakdown of winning authors, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, 1985–2015

where the majority of the winners of the prize were women. It is possible that poetry, as a subfield, does not have inherent the rigid notions of value, gender and authority that dominate the reception of fiction and non-fiction written by women. This analysis would certainly suggest as much, and women are more likely to win a poetry prize than a prize for fiction or non-fiction writing. Author Jennifer Down highlighted the importance of literary prizes for the visibility of authors from marginalised groups, saying: I’m not convinced of prizes as a concept, as a practitioner. But from a bloody-minded tactical perspective, I think yeah, very valuable. And particularly for marginalised voices who wouldn’t necessarily receive the recognition otherwise.

Down’s recognition of the function of literary prizes pinpoints the Bourdieusian justification for literary prizes in the field of cultural production: recognition by one’s peers contributes to the visibility and reputation of

148

A. DANE

an author and for non-white, non-male authors, access to this recognition has, for the last five decades at least, been limited. In 2011, when Kim Scott became the first First Nations author to win two Miles Franklin Literary Awards, he did so in a year when the relationship between gender and the literary prize was at the forefront of discussions within the Australian literary field. Upon accepting the prize, Scott noted that although the gender imbalance of the award is important to acknowledge, First Nations writers are a severely under-represented group among Australia’s literary prize winners (Romei 2011). Of the sample in this study, just two First Nations women have won prizes: Alexis Wright for Carpentaria (2006) and Ali Cobby Eckermann for Ruby Moonlight (2012). First Nations women account for just three per cent of prize-winning women in this study. When Kim Scott won his first Miles Franklin Literary award in 2000 for Benang: From the Heart, he was one of two authors who were awarded the prize that year. Scott, the first First Nations author to win Australia’s most prestigious literary prize shared the honour with Thea Astley (who won for her novel Drylands ). This would be Astley’s fourth and final Miles Franklin win. This event highlighted a two elements that exist deep within the fabric of the Anglophone literary field and literary prize-giving practice. The first is the relative privileging of white women writers, who are consistently the beneficiaries of efforts to counter the dominance of white male authors in the field. The second is the dual consciousness of literary prize judges and literary prize administrators who in one sense enact a reverence for the institution of the literary prize through their participation, and in another fail to recognise the power that they exert over the production and reception of literary texts. The strength of this dual consciousness evident in the outcome of the 2019 Booker Prize, where judges awarded the prize to Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and to Margaret Atwood for The Testaments. Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, and shared the honour with a white woman who had previously won the award (Atwood’s The Blind Assassin won the award in 2000). Writing about the event, Stevie Marsden and Will Smith (2019) noted that awarding the prize to Evaristo and Atwood ‘revealed how the “most powerful literary award” can wield that power in…ultimately dissatisfying ways’. Perhaps if the judges took a more conscious approach to understanding the radiating power of their decisions, Kim Scott and Bernardine Evaristo might not have had to share their wins with white women.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

149

Changes Over Time While progress towards addressing the unequal access to the capital associated with fiction and non-fiction prizes may appear slow or non-linear, there are some small signs that the Stella Prize—and the conversations associated activities promote—may be having an effect on the relationship between gender and the Australian fiction and non-fiction prizes. Looking at the fiction prizes over time reveals quite a lot of variation. However, in the Miles Franklin (Fig. 5.8) and the Christina Stead (Fig. 5.9) awards, a similar pattern emerges wherein there is a sharp increase in the number of women winners from the 1970s and the 1980s, then a decrease throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, before another significant jump in the number of women winning the prizes in the final decade. Conversely, the Victorian Premier’s fiction prize appears to have made a little gain in the number of women winners over the three decades studied (Fig. 5.10). This growth profile appears to be more in line with the general trends that emerge when assessing the representation of women authors in book reviews and at literary festivals over the 50 years to 2015. That there were equal numbers of men and women winners of the Miles Franklin in the decade 2006–2015 should be acknowledged and celebrated. There was a significant increase (to 50%) in the proportion of women winning the Miles Franklin Award; all bar one the women winners of the prize in the decade 2006–2015 did so following the launch of the Stella Prize in 2013, suggesting an increased consciousness of the historic and influential relationship between the Miles Franklin Literary Award and gender. If the introduction of the Stella Prize did influence the judges of the NSW and Victorian Premier’s awards, the effects were not as pronounced. What is almost impossible to know or to predict is whether or not the heightened awareness of the reception and recognition of women’s writing that came with the introduction of the Stella Prize will effect lasting change. Campaigns conducted in the late 1980s around the representation of women authors in book reviews would suggest that a permanent transformation of the field might prove difficult. The Stella Count, which tracks the gender gap in the book reviews in Australia’s major reviewing publications, has inspired many discussions around gender and book reviewing practice. However, as explored in Chapter 3, meaningful and lasting efforts on the part of the literary editors to close this gap remain to be seen. Moreover, as the results of

Fig. 5.8

Gender breakdown of Miles Franklin Literary Award winners, per decade

150 A. DANE

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

151

this analysis show, the Miles may have revised the way women’s writing is considered in the process of naming a winner, but it is unclear whether this ‘shot in the arm’ has been felt by the other influential prizes. The potential influence of the Stella Prize in the fiction sector does not appear to have influenced the relationship between gender and the non-fiction prizes studied, despite the fact that the Stella Prize is awarded for works of both fiction and non-fiction. The period with the strongest representation of women winners of the Douglas Stewart Prize occurred in 1998–2006 (50%), followed by a significant drop in the following period, down to 20%. This is a particularly pronounced example of the notion that, in certain sectors of the field, progress for women authors has stagnated. For reviews of non-fiction titles in the ABR and The Australian, the representation of women authors shrank from the penultimate to the final period of the sample, and there was a reduction in the number of women reviewers of non-fiction of around 7 percentage points across all three reviewing publications analysed. The opposite can be said for the Victorian Premier’s award for nonfiction. The majority of the women winners over the 1985–2015 period occurred in the final decade of the sample: four women won the prize between 1985 and 2002; five woman won the prize between 2006

Fig. 5.9 Gender breakdown of Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction winners, per decade

152

A. DANE

and 2010. The leap in the number of women winners of the Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize coincides with a sustained period when women made up the majority of shortlisted authors for the award. Again, it is difficult to speculate why there was such a sharp increase—or, in the case of the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, decrease—in the representation of women among the prize winners; however, it is important to note that the introduction of the Stella Prize, and the associated discussion, has not had universal positive effects on the proportion of women winning some of Australia’s most prominent literary prizes. While it appears to be too early study the lasting effects of an intervention like the Stella Prize, we can look to the United Kingdom for some insights about the influence of a women’s prize over the practice of other prizes, and whether conversations about gender and literary prestige that surround the introduction of women’s literary prizes inspire lasting change. Looking at two of the UK’s longest-running literary prizes, the Booker Prize (established in 1969) and the novel category for the Costa Book Awards (established in 1971), it is clear that Women’s Prize for Fiction (established in 1996) has not had any significant lasting effect on the number of women winners. The proportion of women winners of the Booker Prize grew by just eight percentage points (going from 32% of winners to 40%) from the period prior to 1996 and the period following. And while growth in the number of winners of the Costa Book Awards did increase more dramatically than in the case of the Booker Prize (by 14 percentage points), the proportion of women winners of this prize following the introduction of the Women’s Prize for Fiction—and the increased attention paid to the work of women’s writing that this facilitated—still sits well below that of men at 43%. The case of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Booker Prize and the Costa Book Awards suggest that significant and long-term change is difficult to implement. Poetry is the sector where women are often in the majority on the list of winners: over time, the number of women winning these two poetry prizes has exceeded 50% (Fig. 5.10). While I cannot be certain why the proportion of women poetry prize winners is so high, I want to point out that the gender breakdown of winners of these two prizes per decade is completely incongruent with the relationship between gender and poetry reviews in ABR, The Age and The Australian, as explored in Chapter 3. When it comes to book reviews in these three publications, women rarely make up more than 30% of poets reviewed in a given year or decade. While it is unclear why

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

153

Fig. 5.10 Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry winners, per decade

this might be the case, it is clear that within the poetry sector, women are overcoming the limited critical attention they receive from the mainstream literary press and dominating the winners’ lists of some of the major prizes in the field. The poetry editor for Australian independent publisher Giramondo Publishing, Emily Stewart (2018), spoke with me about this phenomenon, saying: Men almost exclusively hold the gatekeeping roles for newspaper and magazine reviews and have been in those positions for a long time. Whereas prize panels change year to year so they are going to be more responsive to change … Men seem to be doing the majority of the public critical gatekeeping.

Stewart’s observations highlight the particular ability of literary prizes, and activist interventions into the prize scene such as the Stella Prize, to shift the status quo around gender and perceived literary value that pervades the Australian field. Prizes are agile and, as Stewart notes, are able to be ‘responsive to change’. This is, perhaps, why the representation of women among the poetry prizes studied differs so greatly from the representation of women in poetry reviews in ABR, The Age and The

154

A. DANE

Australian, and gives rise to questions around why this phenomenon is not as pronounced when it comes to fiction and non-fiction reviews and prizes. Winners of Multiple Prizes Analysis of prescribed book reviews and literary festivals has revealed that the power and economic viability of an author in the field is not only related to an author’s interaction with agents of consecration, but also their repeated and ongoing selection and engagement. If repeated selection denotes a stronger position in the literary hierarchy, the question then becomes: are the same authors winning these literary prizes over and over again? The answer to this question appears to be slightly more complex than yes or no. There is a small group of authors, in each sector analysed, who have won multiple literary prizes: 19% of prize-winning fiction authors, 14% of prize-winning non-fiction authors and 13% of prize-winning poets received more than one prize over the sample period. Across fiction, non-fiction and poetry, more men than women won multiple prizes. This gender gap is most pronounced in non-fiction, a sector where men consistently attract a higher proportion of critical attention from major reviewing publications. In total, there were 42 authors over the sample period who won multiple prizes, the overwhelming majority of them in fiction; Lily Brett and David Malouf won prizes in both fiction and poetry, and Barry Hill in non-fiction and poetry (Table 5.2). The majority (65%) of the authors who win multiple prizes are men, but this is unsurprising due to the fact that men win more prizes in the majority of cases. Similarly, there are eight authors who won more than three prizes over the period, just two of them women: Thea Astley and Jennifer Maiden. However, considering the proportion of multi-prizewinning women authors among all the prize-winning women authors complicates this picture (Table 5.3). The dominance of the perceptions of literary value and cultural merit that pervade the process of judging a literary prize is supported and reinforced in the awarding of multiple prizes to the same authors. This is evident in the fact that for fiction and non-fiction prizes, there is almost the same number of multi-prize-winning women as a proportion of women who have won prizes as there are multi-prize-winning men as a proportion of men who have won prizes. This suggests that within

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

155

Table 5.2 Authors who have won multiple literary prizes Author

No. Prizes

Titles

Jessica Anderson Thea Astleya

3 4

Murray Bail Peter Carey

2 9

Brian Castro Michelle de Kretser Robert Drewe Richard Flanagan

4 3 2 2

Tom Flood Helen Garner Kate Grenville Rodney Hall David Ireland

2 2 2 3 3

Elizabeth Jolley Christopher Koch

2 3

David Malouf

5

Roger McDonald Alex Miller

3 3

Kim Scott Peter Temple Tim Winton

4 2 6

Alexis Wright Alan Atkinson Tom Griffiths

2 2 3

Barry Hill

3

Chloe Hooper David Marr

2 3

Tirra Lirra by the River; The Impersonators The Slow Natives; The Acolyte; Reaching Tin River; Drylands Holden’s Performance; Eucalyptus: A Novel War Crimes; Bliss; Illywhacker; Oscar and Lucinda; Jack Maggs; True History of the Kelly Gang; Theft: A Love Story Double Wolf ; After China; Shanghai Dancing The Lost Dog; Questions of Travel The Drowner The Sound of One Hand Clapping; Gould’s Book of Fish Oceana Fine Postcards from Surfers; The Spare Room Dark Places; The Secret River Just Relations; Captivity Captive; The Grisly Wife The Unknown Industrial Prisoner; The Glass Canoe; A Woman of the Future Milk and Honey; The Well Out of Ireland; The Doubleman; Highways to a War An Imaginary Life; Antipodes; The Great World; Remembering Babylon Mr Darwin’s Shooter; The Ballad of Desmond Kale The Ancestors Game; Conditions of Faith; Journey to Stone Country; Lovesong; Coal Creek Benang: From the Heart; That Deadman Dance Truth Shallows; Cloudstreet; Dirt Music; The Turning; Breath Carpentaria The Europeans in Australia Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia; Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica Sitting In; Ghosting William Buckley; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island Barwick; Patrick White: A Life

(continued)

156

A. DANE

Table 5.2 (continued) Author

No. Prizes

Titles

Brian Matthews Mark McKenna

2 3

Drusilla Modjeska Brenda Niall Peter Robb Robert Adamson

3 2 2 3

Judith Beveridge Lily Brett Robert Gray

3 2 3

Kevin Hart Jill Jones Jennifer Maiden

2 2 5

Les Murray

4

Gig Ryan John Tranter

2 3

Louisa Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History of Place; An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark Poppy; The Orchard; Stravinsky’s Lunch The Boyds Midnight in Sicily; M The Clean Dark; The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems The Domesticity of Giraffes; Wolf Notes The Auschwitz Poems; Just Like That Selected Poems: 1963–1983; Certain Things; Afterimages Your Shadow: Poems 1980–1983 Screens Jets Heaven; The Beautiful Anxiety The Winter Baby; Mines; Pirate Rain; Liquid Nitrogen The People’s Other World; Translations from the Natural World; Subhuman Redneck Poems Pure and Applied; New and Selected Poems Under Berlin; Urban Myths: 2010 Poems, New and Selected

a Thea Astley won four Miles Franklin Literary Awards; however, the first of these—for The Well Dressed Explorer in 1962—falls outside of the period of study and therefore has not been included in this analysis

Table 5.3 Proportion of prize-winning authors to multiple winning authors, per gender Genre Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry

Proportion of M prize-winning authors to win multiple prizes (%)

Proportion of W prize-winning authors to win multiple prizes (%)

19.2 14.8 20.8

19.4 13 15.3

each sector there are similar proportions of authors who have accumulated significant symbolic capital, and that even though in real terms this group is considerably larger for men than it is for women, the same proportion of

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

157

men and women authors will ultimately accumulate significant symbolic capital and occupy positions of power in the field. This illustrates how rigid the notions of ‘Literature’ are in the Australian literary field and the role that literary prizes play to perpetuate and reinforce them. The gender prize gap identified from the analysis of these seven Australian literary prizes accords with other territories in the Anglophone literary field. The history of literary prizes in both the US and the UK is marked by a consistent under-representation of women authors and, moreover, books about women (Griffith 2015). In 2009, VIDA Women in Literary Arts undertook an historical review of major United States and international book prizes, which uncovered an historical underrepresentation of women authors. Looking at the US prizes that are similarly positioned to the Miles Franklin and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry reveals a picture that is consistent with the Australian context (Table 5.4). Similar to the Australian literary awards studied, the VIDA analysis articulates the long-standing under-representation of women authors among the winners of America’s most prestigious literary awards, an under-representation that is influenced by a number of broader fieldwide factors, and an under-representation that serves to reinforce these factors. And while literary prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Awards and the Miles Franklin Literary Award exist within specific national literary fields, the broader Anglophone literary culture is transnational and has radiating effects. Table 5.4 Gender breakdown of men and women winners of American literary prizes Prize The American Book Awards LA Times Book Prize (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry) The National Book Awards (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry) The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction The Pulitzer Prize (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry) Source VIDA Historical Count (2010)

Years of analysis

M winners (%)

W winners (%)

1980–2009 1980–2009

58.89 78.82

41.11 21.18

1984–2009

77.46

22.54

1981–2009

82.76

17.24

1948–2009

81.63

18.37

158

A. DANE

Shortlisted Authors Examining the shortlists of literary prizes provides a more nuanced picture of the way symbolic capital is distributed through literary awards, and what this distribution looks like when considering the gender of the authors. Moreover, the examination of the shortlists shows a more pronounced picture of the symbolic violence that occurs with the exclusionary act of awarding literary prizes. While winning a literary prize guarantees an increase in symbolic wealth for the winning author, being named on a literary prize shortlist is also associated with the accumulation of symbolic capital (Fig. 5.11). The majority of Miles Franklin Award shortlists (53%) feature more titles written by men than written by women. This indicates a broad correlation between the prevalence of a particular gender on a prize’s shortlists and the representation of that gender on the list of winners. Moreover, for the years when titles written by women won the Miles, 77% of the time that winning title was picked from a shortlist where there were equal numbers of men and women authors, or women were in the majority. Similarly, in the years since 1987—the year published shortlists were introduced—when titles written by men have won, 73% have been chosen from shortlists on which men were either equally represented or in the majority. Again, this suggests that there is a relationship between the gender of the shortlisted authors and the gender of the winner in a given year. Shortlists for the Victorian Premier’s fiction prize are similar to the Miles Franklin; in some years, 100% of titles on the shortlist were written by men, and there is a close relationship between the number of men and women on the shortlist and the gender of the winning author: 85% of men who won the Premier’s prize were picked from shortlists where men were either in the majority or were represented equally. And while this is, mathematically, what one would expect, it does highlight the importance of the gender make-up of the shortlist when trying to address the literary prize gender gap. Shortlists for the Christina Stead Prize present a less polarised, albeit more complex, picture than the Miles, and, as with the representation of women among prize winners, the Christina Stead appears to distribute symbolic capital more evenly to men and women authors: on average over the 2000–2015 period, 51% of the titles on the shortlists were written by women. And while this may appear to represent a more equal distribution of symbolic capital, during this period 40% of the Christina Stead

Fig. 5.11

Gender breakdown of authors of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction shortlisted titles, 1995–2015

5 HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

159

160

A. DANE

Prize winners were women, indicating a bias against women authors in contention for this prize. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the symbolic violence associated with literary prizes can be seen by comparing the representation of women on shortlists with the representation of women among the winners. For all three fiction prizes, there was a higher percentage of shortlisted titles by women than there were winning titles by women. This points to the existence of bias against women authors: books written by men are winning a disproportionate number of prizes based on the number of titles on the shortlists. This is particularly prominent for the Christina Stead Award; across the period, more titles by women were shortlisted for the prize but men won the prize 60% of the time (Table 5.5). The shortlists for the non-fiction awards differ from the fiction shortlists (Fig. 5.12). On average, over the 2000 to 2015 period, women wrote 37% of the titles on the shortlists for the Douglas Stewart Prize and won 37% of the prizes during the same period. However, as with the fiction awards, for the Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize there is a gap between the number of shortlisted titles written by women and the number of winning titles written by women. For the period when shortlists were available—1995 to 2015—44% of the shortlisted titles were Table 5.5 Proportion of shortlists versus proportion of prizes per gender Prize

Shortlisted titles per gender (%)

Prizes per gender (%)

Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1987–2015 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, 2000–2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, 1995–2015 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, 2000–2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 1995–2015 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, 2000–2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, 1995–2015

M W M W M W M W M W

authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors

= = = = = = = = = =

56 44 49 51 62 38 63 37 66 44

M W M W M W M W M W

authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors authors

= = = = = = = = = =

67 33 60 40 65 35 63 37 76 34

M W M W

authors authors authors authors

= = = =

44 56 49 51

M W M W

authors authors authors authors

= = = =

32 68 45 55

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

161

Fig. 5.12 Gender breakdown of authors of Douglas Stewart Prize for NonFiction shortlisted titles, 2000–2015

written by women but only 34% of the winners were women, which again points to the existence of bias. For women writers, the relationship between the gender make-up of the shortlist and the gender of the winner of the Douglas Stewart prize is not as strong as the other prizes. The women who did win this award were more likely (57%) to have come from a shortlist where they were in the minority. However, 89% of the men who won this prize did so from a shortlist where men were either equally represented or constituted the majority of authors. The Douglas Stewart Prize is the only prize in this study where the connection between women winners and the gender breakdown of a given year’s shortlist is weak. For the Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize, 75% of the women winners from 1995 to 2015 were chosen from majority-women or gender-equal shortlists, and all the men who won were shortlisted among a majority of titles written by men. Similarly to the winners of the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Victorian Premier’s poetry award, the shortlists for these poetry prizes appear to be far more equitable that the fiction and non-fiction prizes, but the correlation between shortlists and winners is still strong. On average across the 2000–2015 period, poetry by women makes up 56% of the titles shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize, and for the same period women won 68% of the prizes. Likewise, on average women make-up around 51% of the poetry titles on the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for

162

A. DANE

Fig. 5.13 Gender breakdown of authors of Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry shortlisted titles, 2000–2015

Poetry shortlists from 1995 to 2015 and constitute 55% of the winners (Fig. 5.13). The gap between the number of shortlisted titles per gender and the number of winning titles per gender is evident with these two poetry awards; however, in this instance bias is against the poetry written by men, as women win a greater proportion of prizes than their proportion of shortlisted works. Again, it is unclear why poetry awards differ so significantly from fiction and non-fiction. However, what this analysis does reveal is that there is a correlation between the gender make-up of a shortlist and the gender of the winning author, suggesting that women are more likely to win a prize if they are shortlisted among a majority of women authors, and men are more likely to win a prize if they make up the majority on a shortlist. Moreover, considering the high representation of women in the poetry prizes shows that dominant ideologies around gender and writing, on both sides of the scale, are difficult to shift.

Prize Judges The judges who decide the shortlist and the winning titles are the most powerful actors in the prize-giving process. It is their definitions of literary and cultural value that feed the perceptions of ‘Literature’ and, indeed,

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

163

who writes it. On the position of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in the Australian field, Emmett Stinson (2016b), notes: Major prizes exert a disproportionate effect on the way that cultural products within a field are valued. It is for this reason that the Miles Franklin Award … continues to be an important reflection of the way the Australian literary field values itself.

The process by which individuals are selected to judge literary awards appears to be consistent across the prizes in this study. The judging panels are put together by the prize administrators and panellists are often chosen based on their position within the literary field or past involvement with the prize (Kirpalani 2017). Conversations with the administrators of the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards highlighted the importance of an individual’s accumulated symbolic capital when it comes to being selected to sit on a prize judging panel, and there is significant overlap between the judges of literary prizes and the winners of literary prizes, book reviewers, literary editors, publishers and authors: Peter Rose, David Marr, Tony Birch, Louise Adler, Brenda Niall and Kerryn Goldsworthy have all featured on multiple judging panels across the 1965–2015 period. Publicist Alice Lewinsky (2016) noted that: I think more generally, the same people are judging a lot of literary awards and people are recycled quite frequently, which I wonder if maybe, if you [could] bring in some different ideas.

This ‘recycling’ of the same judges through the various Australian literary prizes is, perhaps, why prizes such as the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Awards for Non-Fiction appear to have such a rigid relationship to gender and why, more broadly, there is a dearth of First Nations literary award winners. Moreover, this ‘recycling’ is similar to the findings from Demoor et al. (2008) study wherein the perception of literary merit has been established by a small pool of agents in the field who cycle through the various literary prize panels, exerting and re-exerting their literary values. NSW Premier’s Literary Award administrator Mandy Kretzschmar (2017) said of the judge selection process: Judges are usually authors themselves and a great proportion of them have won or been shortlisted for the awards in the past.

164

A. DANE

Moreover, both the NSW and the Victorian Premier’s awards adopt a similar approach to diversity on the judging panels, noting that gender, age and cultural diversity were an important factor in the selection of judges. While neither of the administrators was able to provide any detail on the deliberation process, Victorian Premier’s award administrator Amita Kirpalani (2017) did report that: I don’t brief the judges to think about gender … but what I think is interesting is that, especially last year [2016] … final discussions that I was party to, more than gender the discussion of race was really essential.

Kirpalani’s account indicates that judges are becoming increasingly aware of both their influence and their potential biases. If the judges ‘read’ texts differently depending on the gender or ethnicity of the author, as KonYu (2016) suggests, this may influence the winners and shortlists for the prizes in this study. The relationship between gender and judging panels, again as in the prize shortlists, differs across fiction, non-fiction and poetry. If an examination of the relationship between gender and the winners and shortlisted authors shows us who is accumulating symbolic capital and which gender has greater access to this well of prestige, analysing the interaction between gender and judging panels highlights the agents who are distributing symbolic capital to authors and prompts us to ask the question: does having a higher number of women on judging panels ensure that more women are shortlisted for and win literary prizes? (Fig. 5.14). For the Miles Franklin Award, there were 23 years when the judging panel had more women than men, 25 years when the panel had more men than women and three years when there were equal numbers of men and women. It is interesting to note that in the four years when there was a shortlist made up entirely of books written by men (1992, 1994, 2009 and 2011), women made up 60% of the judges on the panel. Similarly, in 2013, the one year when women made up 100% of the shortlisted authors for the Miles, 60% of the judging panel were men. Across the 1965– 2015 sample period, the relationship between the proportion of men and women on the judging panel and the winner of the prize shows that men have won more Miles Franklin Awards when women have been in the majority on the judging panel. This is not particularly surprising, seeing as men have won the majority of the Miles Franklin awards; however, these

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

165

Fig. 5.14 Gender breakdown of Miles Franklin Literary Award judging panels, 1965–2015

results also show that the majority of times women have won the award have occurred in years when men make up the majority of the judging panel. In the three years when there was an equal number of men and women on the panel, a man has won the award. Over the history of the Victorian Premier’s fiction prize, women have constituted the majority of judges on panels 50% of the time, men have been in the majority 47% of the time and there has been one year when there were equal numbers of men and women judges. As in the Miles, men have won more prizes when the judging panel is predominantly made up of women, and women have won the prize more often in the years when the majority of the judges on the panel are men. Again like the Miles, the year when the panel was equal parts men and women, a title written by a man was decided as the winner. While it is difficult to definitively say that majority-women judging panels are more likely to award a prize to a title written by a man, what this does show is that simply increasing the representation of women on judging panels does not ensure an increased representation of women on the list of winners. Similarly to the results from the analysis of book reviewing practice in Chapter 3, achieving more equitable—and, indeed, sustainable—access to the symbolic capital attached to literary prizes will take a more nuanced approach than just including more women in the process. There are some similarities between the non-fiction judging panels and the fiction judging panels. For the Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize,

166

A. DANE

more often than not the judging panel has a majority of women. As with the Miles Franklin Award, in the two years when shortlists were made up of titles written by men—1997 and 2003—men were not in the majority on the judging panel: in 1997 60% of the judges on the panel were women, and in 2003 there were equal numbers of men and women. However, unlike the two fiction prizes, women were more likely to win a Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize if the majority of the jury panel were women (Fig. 5.15). The Victorian Premier’s poetry prize was the only award in the sample where men constituted the majority of judges throughout the period and the only prize where men were awarded more prizes from majority-men judging panels. Moreover, the Victorian poetry award is also the only prize in this study where there were more prizes awarded to women than men. This is particularly interesting when comparing this prize with the fiction and non-fiction prizes, where the majority of judging panels were made up of women but titles by men constituted the majority of winners (Fig. 5.16). These results highlight the fact that the judging panels for literary awards, especially since the early 1980s, have been more or less equal

Fig. 5.15 Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for NonFiction judging panels, 1985–2015

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

167

Fig. 5.16 Gender breakdown of Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry judging panels, 1985–2015

in the number of men and women represented. Typically judging panels are made up of either three or five members, making equal numbers of men and women impossible. For each of the four prizes examined here, there is a fairly even back-and-forth between juries where women are in the majority and juries where men are in the majority. For the eight years when there were even numbers of judges—1985, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2006—five had equal numbers of men and women. It appears that judging panels where women are in the majority are more likely to award a prize to a title written by a man than are judging panels where men are in the majority. Again, poetry differs from fiction and non-fiction prizes and, for the Premier’s Poetry Award, 62% of the prizes awarded by women-majority juries have gone to works of poetry written by women. The judging panels of the Miles Franklin and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards also reveal a severe under-representation of First Nations authors. The not one First Nations judge was included on the Miles Franklin judging panel throughout the sample period, Tony Birch was a member of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award judging panel in 2011 and 2012, as well as a member of the Premier’s Non-Fiction Award

168

A. DANE

judging panel in 2007, and Eve Fesl was a member of the Premier’s Non-Fiction award panel in 1989. Information about the Christina Stead, Douglas Stewart and Kenneth Slessor judging panels is not made public.

The Relationship Between Literary Prizes and Sales Performance Assessing the overlap between prize-winning fiction, non-fiction and poetry and the titles on bestseller lists can help illuminate whether or not winning or being shortlisted for a literary prize might contribute to a stronger sales performance. This, in turn, can shed light on the influences that prizes have beyond the field of cultural production, as cultural intermediaries. Similarly to the overlap between book reviews and bestsellers, there is no significant overlap between titles that are shortlisted for or win a literary prize and the top 50 bestsellers in a given year. However, there is greater overlap between prizes and bestsellers than there is between reviews and bestsellers. Over the period 2003 to 2015—the years when Nielsen BookScan sales data is available—just over 16% of titles that were shortlisted for or won a prize appeared on the BookScan bestseller lists, which is on average around 9% each year, compared with around 2% of reviewed titles. Of the titles that were shortlisted for or won a literary prize and went on to become bestsellers, almost 60% of the authors were men. There are two years, 2009 and 2010, when there was a notable increase in the overlap between prizes and bestsellers: in 2009, four titles—around 12% of the bestsellers—were either shortlisted for or won a literary prize and were among the top-50 selling titles, and in 2010 there were nine (around 27%) titles. This small spike in the overlap of bestselling and prize-winning or shortlisted titles is particularly interesting in light of their authors. Tim Winton’s Breath (2008), Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (2008), Peter Carey’ s Parrot and Olivier (2009), Alex Miller’s Lovesong (2009) and Paul Kelly’s memoir How to Make Gravy (2010) all attracted both economic and symbolic capital over the years 2009 and 2010; each of these authors is accompanied by well-established and highly respected reputations both within and beyond the field of cultural production; and, all of them are men. These authors perhaps illustrate that for a literary prize to translate into a strong sales performance, a certain level of established symbolic wealth is required.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

169

Table 5.6 Bestselling and prize-winning/shortlisted titles across multiple years Author

Title

Bestselling years

Prizes

Tim Winton

Dirt Music (2001)

2003, 2004

Helen Garner

2004, 2005

Geraldine Brooks Tim Winton

Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) March (2004) Breath (2009)

2005, 2006 2008, 2009, 2010

Christos Tsiolkas

The Slap (2009)

2009, 2010, 2011

Anna Funder

All That I Am (2011)

2011, 2012, 2013

Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the 2013, 2014, 2015 Deep North (2013)

MFLA, CSPF, VPLA-F DSPNF, VPLA-NF CSPF MFLA, CSPF, VPLA-F MFLA, VPLA-F MFLA, CSPF, VPLA-F MFLA, CSPF, VPLA-F

This analysis also revealed that a small group of shortlisted or prizewinning titles that go on to be bestsellers retain their position as a bestseller for more than one year, indicating that the prestige and publicity attached to winning a literary prize may have a medium-term influence on sales performance. In the table, the instances where the title won the award are rendered bold (Table 5.6). These six authors—Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Geraldine Brooks, Christos Tsiolkas, Anna Funder and Richard Flanagan—have significant accumulated symbolic and economic capital, situating them in the seat of power in the literary field. This supports Bourdieu’s (1993) notion that although economic capital will rarely translate to symbolic gains, for a small group of powerful authors, accumulated symbolic capital will eventually bring about economic success. And if women are continually overlooked, or even ignored, their ability to amass this capital is undermined.

Conclusions It can hardly be labelled unexpected when a 50-year survey of Australia’s most prestigious fiction, non-fiction and poetry prizes reveals that books by men have, on the whole, won more times than books by women. What is possibly surprising is that what might look like the simplest solution to achieving gender parity among prize winners—increasing the number of

170

A. DANE

women on judging panels—is not the solution that will, on its own, bring about meaningful change. Particularly in the case of fiction and nonfiction prizes, there is nothing to suggest a direct relationship between the number of women on selection panels and the number of women shortlisted or winning literary prizes. Due to the fact that there has been such a small number of First Nations women judges on literary prize panels over the period, it is impossible to draw a similar conclusion with regard to the number of prize-winning First Nations women authors. I would like to turn to the comments Morag Fraser made on behalf of the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award judging panel. Responding to criticisms raised about the shortlist that featured books written exclusively by men, Fraser stated that the gender of the authors was not a consideration for the judges throughout their deliberations (Cunningham 2011). In light of the results presented in this chapter, which found that men tend to dominate the winner lists, maybe the solution to the gender bias of literary prizes is for judging panels to engage more critically with the gender of the authors and acknowledge, and attempt to challenge, essentialist notions around gender, race and literary value, where only men write prize-worthy books. Veronica Sullivan (2017), former manager of the women-only Stella Prize, spoke with me about the issue of being ‘gender-blind’ in the distribution of symbolic capital and why this might not be the best way to achieve equality. She said: We are all raised in a culture that values men’s voices more highly [than women’s] and we all internalise those messages, and it is more about how you unlearn them and how you become conscious of them so you can start to dismantle them.

In his exploration of the modes by which judging panels pick a winning book from a shortlist, John Street (2005) emphasises not only the consecrating power of literary prizes but also how these decisions influence the literary field beyond the award ceremony and press coverage. Street (2005: 228) writes: The operation of juries serves to silence some voices and to give authority to others. In this sense, the prize jury is a microcosm of wider processes that organise esthetic evaluation.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

171

He goes on to say that in the process of judging a literary prize, power operates to privilege certain cultural forms and expressions [and] to give legitimacy to some types of artistic expression. (Street 2005: 229)

While this characterisation of prize judges is typical of the power that all agents of consecration possess, it is particularly interesting when assessing literary prizes. There are a number of factors that contribute to the status of literary prizes as agents of consecration and cultural intermediaries: their relationship with agents beyond the field, such as the mainstream media and the political field; the ever-increasing prize money that helps to maintain interest from both authors inside and readers outside the field of cultural production; the symbolic capital of those tasked with selecting a shortlist and winner; and their omnipresence in Australia’s cultural industries. This, together with the fact that (generally) one winner for each prize is chosen each year, means that one voice or one kind of literary expression is placed above all others in full view of both the literary field and the wider social and political fields. There is a disproportionate relationship between gender and the voices that are given authority when it comes to the awarding of literary prizes. For fiction and non-fiction, books written by men have greater access to the symbolic capital associated with literary prizes. Not only have more titles written by men won the fiction and non-fiction prizes examined in this chapter, but there have also been more years when titles written by men have made up the majority of the shortlisted works. However, increased scrutiny of the intersection of gender and literary prestige on the part of judges, publishers and administrators may provide a framework to address this imbalance. The voices of women authors do not appear to exert the same influence on our understanding of literary value and definitions of merit. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, wherein the doxa of the literary field is continually defined and redefined according to what the agents of consecration deem prize worthy. When, especially in the case of fiction and non-fiction, one group’s voices are given prominence over another, they possess a greater power over the way the habitus of all members of the literary field regard literary merit. Or, as English (2002: 111) says, ‘Power euphemises itself as merit’. The way to disrupt this cycle may just be to acknowledge that a ‘gender-blind’ approach to judging literary prizes is not a level playing field and that what we understand to be ‘prize-worthy’ literature may

172

A. DANE

involve more than simply the text’s aesthetic properties. By holding on to notions of ‘purity’ around the judging process, the judges are reinforcing the dispositions that regulate the perceptions of legitimacy. The introduction of the women-only Stella Prize, and the conversations it promoted around gender and literary recognition, may have influenced a shift in the way we think about women and the allocation of literary prestige. Former Stella Prize Manager Veronica Sullivan recognises the importance of the increased attention given to the relationship between gender and Australia’s literary prize culture, noting that these conversations may have influenced ‘much better gender representation’ among the literary prizes. Sullivan’s claims are supported by the increased number of women winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award since the launch of the Stella Prize in 2012. This, Sullivan (2017) argues, could be attributed in part to the literary field addressing its ‘unconscious biases’. What Sullivan is describing is an attempt to transform the doxa and, in turn, subvert the habitus of the literary field. The Stella Prize is an attempt to challenge the dispositions that underpin the status quo and the unexamined biases that support a field where the powerful agents retain their power and continue to define legitimacy. While the Stella Prize has championed the writing of women in Australia, up until 2018—the sixth time the prize was awarded—all the winners of the prize were white women: Alexis Wright won the 2018 Stella Prize for the biography Tracker. Access to the visibility and recognition that comes with being shortlisted for and winning a literary prize is, on the whole, unequal. However, the access white women have to this power is greater than that of First Nations authors. This was exemplified by my conversation with Peter Rose, Editor of the Australian Book Review and former judge of the Miles. Speaking about the 2009 and 2011 all-male Miles Franklin shortlists, Rose (2018) said gender was not an issue during his tenure on the jury: I don’t remember it being an issue in the Miles because by the 2000s, around 2000 when I was doing it, so many great books were, novels were being written by women. Thea [Astley] won it that year, I forget who else.

In 2000 Thea Astley was the joint winner of the Miles Franklin Award with Kim Scott, the first First Nations author to win the prize. Rose’s forgetfulness is, perhaps, emblematic of the gap that exists between women and authors of colour, especially Australia’s First Nations women authors.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

173

Further research is required to assess the medium-to-long-term effects of the Stella Prize. There are signs, especially when considering the Miles Franklin, that the prize is having a positive effect on the relationship between gender and literary prizes; however, it is unclear whether there will be lasting change. As we have seen with the activist research around gender and book reviews conducted in the 1980s (see Cooter et al. 1987; Spender 1989), long-term transformation of the attitudes that inform ideas around literary excellence is difficult to bring about.

References Allan S and Driscoll B (2013) Making the List: The Value of Prizes for Women Writers and the Construction of Educational Reading Lists. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 127, 140. Allington P (2011) What Is Australia, Anyway? The Glorious Limitations of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Australian Book Review 332: 23–34. Bode K and Murphy T (2014) Methods and Canons: An Interdisciplinary Excursion. In: Longley Artur P and Bode K (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu P (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu P and Passeron J (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Clark A (1998) Convict Tale Takes Top Book Award. The Age, 5 June. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cossar L (1997) A Long Shot Makes the Miles. The Age, 6 June. Cunningham S (2011) A Prize of One’s Own: Flares, Cock-Forests and Dreams of a Common Language. Kill Your Darlings: 6. Available at: https://kil lyourdarlings.com.au/article/a-prize-of-ones-own-flares-cock-forests-and-dre ams-of-a-common-language. Accessed 3 July 2018. De Nooy W (1988) Gentlemen of the Jury…: The Features of Experts Awarding Literary Prizes. Poetics 17: 531–545. Demoor M et al. (2008) ‘And the Winner Is?’ Researching the Relationship Between Gender and Literary Awards in Flanders, 1981–2000. Journal of Gender Studies 17(1): 27–39. Down J (2018) Interview, 28 March. Driscoll B (2009) The Politics of Prizes. Meanjin 68: 71–78.

174

A. DANE

Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. English J (2002) Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards and the Rules of Art. New Literary History 33(1): 109–135. English J (2009) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fitzpatrick S (2013) Quite a Wake Up Call for Miles Franklin Winner. The Australian, 20 June. Flint N (2014) Stella Prize Sends a Message That Women Are Incapable of Competing Intellectually with Men. The Advertiser, 29 April. Available at: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/stella-prize-sends-a-mes sage-that-women-are-incapable-of-competing-intellectually-with-men-nicolleflint/news-story/4e933e5d9923ca9ba623458c8fb8ff6e. Accessed 15 July 2018. Flood A (2015) Books About Women Less Likely to Win Prizes, Study Finds. The Guardian, 1 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2015/jun/01/books-about-women-less-likely-to-win-prizes-study-finds. Accessed 15 July 2018. Free D (2009) What’s Wrong With Australian Fiction: A Sceptical Look at the Miles Franklin Shortlist. Quadrant, December: 22–29. Griffith N (2015) Books About Women Don’t Win Big Awards: Some Data. Nicola Griffith. Available at: https://nicolagriffith.com/2015/05/26/ books-about-women-tend-not-to-win-awards/. Accessed 15 January 2020. Heller and Stevens (2015) Does an Award Like the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction Help or Hurt the Cause of Women Writers? New York Times, 26 May. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/books/review/doesan-award-like-the-baileys-womens-prize-for-fiction-help-or-hurt-the-cause-ofwomen-writers.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Heseltine H (2001) The Most Glittering Prize: The Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1957–1998. Canberra: Australian Defence Force Academy. Horn H (2015) France: Where Men Have a Monopoly on Good Writing. The Atlantic, 4 November. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/internati onal/archive/2015/11/prix-goncourt-france-women/414241/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Kirpalani A (2017) Interview, 29 March. Kon-Yu N (2016) A Testicular Hit-List of Literary Big Cats’. Overland 223: 14–20. Kretzchmar M (2017) Interview, 11 May. Lamond J (2011) Stella Versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia. Meanjin 70(3): 32–39. Lever S (1997) Government Patronage and Literary Reputations. Southerly 57(3): 104–114.

5

HIERARCHIES OF LEGITIMACY: GENDER AND LITERARY PRIZES

175

Lewinsky A (2016) Interview, 22 November. Marsden S and Smith W (2019) And the Winner Is…? Prizes and Awards in Arts and Culture. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Marsden S and Squires C (2019) The First Rule of Judging Club…: Inside the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Miles Franklin Literary Award (2017) Guidelines. Available at: https://www. perpetual.com.au/~/media/perpetual/pdf/resources/mfla/2018_miles_fran klin_guidelines_final.ashx?la=en. Accessed 15 July 2018. Moi T (1991) Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. New Literary History 22(4): 1017–1049. Nancarrow D (2012) Writer’s Dream Run Culminates in Miles. The Age, 21 June. Norris S (2006) The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective. Journal for Cultural Research 10(2): 139–158. NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (2016) Entry Guidelines. Available at: https:// www.sl.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/pla_2016_guidelines.pdf. Accessed 25 June 2020. NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (2018) About the Awards. Available at: http:// www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library-awards/about-awards. Accessed 15 July 2018. O’Brien K (2016) 10 Facts about the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Bookseller, 6 June. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/insight/10facts-about-baileys-womens-prize-fiction-331221. Accessed 15 July 2018. Pouly M P (2016) Playing both Sides of the Field: The Anatomy of a ‘Quality’ Bestseller. Poetics 59: 20–34. Reserve Bank of Australia (2018) Inflation Calculator. Available at: https:// www.rba.gov.au/calculator/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Romei S (2011) Second Dane for Miles Franklin Winner. The Australian, 23 June. Romei S (2014) Sonya Hartnett on Children, Golden Boys, and The Stella Prize—And Animals. The Australian, 16 August. Romei S (2015) Laguna’s Misfits Catches Eye of Miles Franklin Panel. The Australian, 24 June. Rose P (2018) Interview, 27 March. Sapiro G (2016) The Metamorphosis of the Modes of Consecration in the Literary Field: Academies, Literary Prizes, Festivals. Poetics 59: 5–19. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Squires C (2004) A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe. Javnost—The Public 11(4): 37–47. Squires C (2013) Literary Prizes and Awards. In: Harper G (ed) A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 291–303.

176

A. DANE

Steger J (2000) Two Share Miles Franklin. The Age, 9 June. Steger J (2002) Big-Guns Shortlisted for Literary Prize. The Age, 19 April. Steger J (2004) Literary Lions in Line-Up for Australia’s Weightiest Book Prize. The Age, 30 June. Steger J (2009) Melbourne Novelist Tsiolkas on Miles Franklin Shortlist. The Age, April 16. Available at: https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/ books/melbourne-novelist-tsiolkas-on-miles-franklin-shortlist-20090416-ge7 sx8.html. Accessed 25 June 2020. Stella Prize (2018) About Us. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/ about/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Stewart E (2018) Interview, 24 July. Street J (2005) Luck, Power, Corruption, Democracy? Judging Arts Prizes. Cultural Politics 1(2): 215–232. Stinson E (2016a) Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption. Australian Humanities Review 59: 23–43. Stinson E (2016b) Small Publishers and the Miles Franklin Award. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 137–149. Sullivan V (2017) Interview, 29 March. The Canberra Times (1975) Award. The Canberra Times, 23 April: 7. The Wheeler Centre (2017) Conditions and Guidelines. Available at: https:// www.wheelercentre.com/projects/victorian-premier-s-literary-awards-2016/ conditions-and-guidelines. Accessed 15 July 2018. The Wheeler Centre (2018) About the Awards. Available at: https://www.whe elercentre.com/projects/victorian-premier-s-literary-awards-2018/about-theawards. Accessed 15 July 2018. VIDA Women in the Literary Arts (2010) VIDA Historical Count. Available at: https://www.vidaweb.org/vida-count/best-of-2009/. Accessed 15 January 2020. Wright A (2018) Alexis Wright’s 2018 Stella Prize Acceptance Speech. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/2018/04/alexis-wright-acceptance-speech/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wyndham S (2004) Judges Storm Out of Miles Franklin Literary Prize. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/ news/Books/Judges-storm-out-of-Miles-Franklin-prize/2004/12/21/110 3391774639.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wyndham S (2016) The Hidden Costs That Threaten Australian Literary Awards. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December. Available at: https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-hidden-costs-that-threaten-australianliterary-awards-20161202-gt32wc.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Zangen B (2003) Women as Readers, Writers and Judges: Controversy About the Orange Prize for Fiction. Women’s Studies 32: 281–299.

CHAPTER 6

Intersecting and Interacting Agents of Consecration: Gender and the Australian Publishing Field

Consecratory institutions operating in any field of cultural production do not do so in isolation, nor do the fields themselves. Bourdieu’s conception of the field serves as a valuable tool for understanding the complex and interrelated structures of positions and power that influence authorial reputation and literary tastes. This chapter examines this structure and the interrelationship of agents of consecration to explore both the historic and the contemporary state of gender and the literary field. Bringing the agents together in this fashion allows us to see which agents are the most powerful, the sites where authors accumulate the most symbolic capital, and how the mechanisms of symbolic capital acquisition have changed over time. I argue that, increasingly, book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes work together and are influenced by one another in their practice as institutions of legitimisation. The upshot of this collaborative relationship is that the power of book reviewing publications, literary editors and book reviewers to act as a barrier to entry for authors in the pursuit of symbolic capital. It is important to interrogate what constitutes the component parts of an author’s literary reputation, and how these component parts are influenced by non-textual factors such as gender. In this chapter I raise questions around the conceptual model used in this volume, and explore what the limitations of this model tells us about how literary reputations

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_6

177

178

A. DANE

are built and maintained. The increasing prevalence and interconnectedness of consecratory institutions in the literary field is a major factor in the maintenance of the unequal relationship between gender and prestige, and simply highlighting and acknowledging the existence of the underrepresentation of women authors and authors of colour in the Australian field will do little to transform the structures that uphold the status quo. In this book I have presented a series of analyses of the way the relationship between gender and symbolic capital acquisition plays out in relation to different agents of consecration. The visibility of women authors and women reviewers within the book reviewing publications analysed in this study has increased over the period 1965–2015; and, decade on decade, the representation of women in ABR, The Age and The Australian in the decade 2006–2015 is far stronger than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this growth appears to have plateaued over the three decades to 2015, and it is difficult to see a time when women authors will be equally represented in the review pages of Australia’s major daily newspapers and cultural magazines. This longitudinal research reveals that despite efforts on the part of activist researchers in the 1980s and the introduction of the Stella Count in 2013, awareness of the gender gap in book reviewing on the part of the reviewing publications’ editors is failing to bring about meaningful change to close this gap. Again, the invisible influence of the disposition of individuals in the field begins to show as the publications examined in this study, and their editors, keep the ceiling for women writers firmly in place. However, book reviews are not the only institutions with a difficult relationship between gender and the stubborn disposition of the Australian literary field; the way that literary festivals are programmed is, perhaps, the most manifest expression of this relationship at work. The structure of the literary festival program shows the relational structure between gender and prestige in the field, where women are, relatively, highly represented in literary festival programs. However, interrogating the particular festival events and the positions and roles with each event exposes the regressive relationship between gender and the field that pervades other sectors and helps to maintain the status quo of white male dominance. At the three most high-profile events within the literary festival program—the keynote address, the ‘in conversation’ event and the panel discussion—the problematic relationship between gender and the field is once again visible. Men are overwhelmingly represented as festival keynotes, as the author or subject of ‘in conversation’

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

179

events and on literary festival panels. In all but a handful of years, women make up the majority of panel and ‘in conversation’ moderators or facilitator. Moreover, when single-gender panels are convened, women are far more likely to discuss gender, sex, romance and family, whereas men are more often tasked with discussing the ‘serious’ topics of literature and writing. Efforts on the part of festival directors to increase the number of women in the program do not appear to be having a meaningful effect on the position that women occupy within the festival’s program of events. However, interventions into the Australian literary field, such as the Stella Prize for Women’s Writing, appear to be having some positive influence on the representation of women among literary prize winners. The visibility of the symbolic violence enacted through the awarding of literary prizes in the Australian field over the period 1965–2015 has helped to define the position of women authors in the literary field. The limited access women authors have historically been afforded to the symbolic and economic rewards attached to winning a literary prize, especially when it comes to fiction and non-fiction prizes, highlights not only the gender prestige gap in the literary field, but also the way that ideas around the cultural value of books, and definitions of ‘literary worth’, have helped to maintain traditional, field-wide structures. However, what the results of this study also show is that interventions such as the Stella Prize can in some instances have a positive effect on the representation of women among the prize winners, and that conversations about the deep-seated ideas that surroud gender and prestige, conversations that have been promoted by the existence of the Stella Prize, could influence the number of women winning major awards. And while more research is needed to understand the medium-to-long-term effects of the introduction of the Stella Prize, data collected from the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction hint at a positive change for the relationship between gender and literary prizes.

A Model for Understanding the Movement of Symbolic Capital Around the Australian Literary Field The model developed to assess the relationship between gender and symbolic capital acquisition in the Australian literary field for this research reveals that a very small minority of authors interact with all four agents of

180

A. DANE

consecration. Of the approximately 36,000 individual authors who have spoken at a Adelaide Writers’ Week or the Melbourne Writers Festival; were reviewed in ABR, The Age and/or The Australian; or were shortlisted or won the Miles Franklin Literary Award or the NSW or Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, around 7% (2369 authors) interacted with more than one of these agents of consecration, and just 237 authors or 0.7% interacted with all three of these consecratory institutions over the 50-year period between 1965 and 2015. This is not a particularly large proportion, from whatever perspective it is examined; there are not many authors who could be considered prestigious by the metrics defined in this research. Looking at the way all three institutions work in concert to identify the ‘legitimacy’ of authors emphasises the exclusionary nature of the struggle for positions within the field, and the narrow conception of literary value that attracts consecration. However, the model used in this study to identify the authors with the most symbolic capital is imperfect. And while it is a rigorous standard by which the reputations of contemporary Australian authors can be analysed, authors from outside Australia and some who fall just outside the sample period are notably absent. However, testing the limitations of this model gives rise to more questions around—and provides some insights into—the way that legitimacy is secured in the literary field and the component parts of a robust and long-lasting literary reputation. The assumption that lies at the centre of this model is that authors who interact with more agents of consecration have more symbolic capital and, in turn, prestige. And while this is an effective method for analysing the power of the authors who do interact with book reviewers and literary festivals and literary prizes, the access that particular groups are afforded to the power that comes with this interaction, and the power that each agent of consecration holds within the field, it does not tell the whole story. These institutions focus on the exchange of symbolic capital with living authors; book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes are concerned with consecrating the contemporary. Therefore, when examining where and when agents of consecration overlap in the field, and where authors acquire symbolic capital from multiple sources, the prestige of dead authors, especially long-dead authors, is often erased. This means that there are a lot of authors whose absence among the ‘most prestigious’ is unusual, and that—according to the model used in this study—there is no way to recognise the literary reputations of dead authors. But there are ways that dead authors remain relevant and

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

181

powerful in the field, including film and television adaptations, on school and university curricula, inclusion in publishers’ ‘classics’ collections and ‘best book/novel of all time’ lists published in legacy newspapers and magazines. The limitations of this model are also clear when the time period, 1965–2015, is questioned. 50 years is a long time for a study of this nature, however, there are some notable absences from the analysis that establish grounds for interrogation. Patrick White, Christina Stead, Joan Lindsay and Henry Handel Richardson, who were most active and published their most critically acclaimed work at the edges of the scope of this study, are all powerful and enduring presences in the Australian literary field but would not be considered ‘most prestigious’ by the metrics defined in this study. The assumption that the number of agents of consecration an author interacts with over the sample period denotes their level of prestige fails to take into account the presence and power of authors from countries other than Australia. And while two of the agents included in this study— book reviews and literary festivals—have all featured a large number of international authors, the seven prizes in this study are only open to Australian citizens or residents. The result is that Margaret Atwood, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, Isabel Allende, Ian McEwan, Alice Walker, Jonathan Franzen, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Baldwin, Ann Patchett, Orhan Pamuk, Arundhati Roy, Chaim Potok, Wole Soyinka, Tennessee Williams and Chinua Achebe are all authors who are not considered among the most prestigious according to this model, despite being reviewed multiple times and appearing at Adelaide Writers’ Week and/or the Melbourne Writers Festival. Moreover, counting the instances where authors interact with agents of consecration over a specified time period privileges authors who produce a large body of work, however, being prolific does not necessarily denote power in the field. This can be seen, and will be explored in more detail below, by considering the ‘most reviewed’ authors across the study. And I in no way mean to suggest that crime writer Peter Corris is not an Australian author of note, or that we should overlook Alexander McCall Smith, author of the wildly popular No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency; rather, these highly productive, and highly reviewed, authors are not necessarily the most prestigious. Instead, it appears that this model, and the methods that form its foundation, are perfectly suited to describe the career and accumulated

182

A. DANE

symbolic capital of David Malouf. Malouf published his first collection of poetry, Bicycle and Other Poems, in 1970 and his first novel, Johnno, in 1975. Since then, Malouf has consistently published critically acclaimed and prize-winning works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It then follows that for an author like Malouf, who is prolific, highly acclaimed and has been writing for almost all of the period studied— and is, in addition, a non-Indigenous man—will rise to the top. But there are Australian authors with tremendous literary reputations, authors like Elizabeth Harrower, who have not interacted with the literary field and consecratory institutions in the way that David Malouf has and, therefore, do not necessarily meet the criteria of ‘prestigious’ when this model is applied to the field. Within the Bourdieusian framework used in this study, repeated selection leads to increased power, and the continual engagement with agents of consecration ensures that authors are frequently and consistently being identified as worthy of critical discourse; however, such a framework does not and cannot account for the position of every author within the field. It is through assessing these limitations that we can gain a more rigorous understanding of the way that the literary field operates and how the struggle for positions within its complex hierarchy plays out. Yes, consecratory institutions are involved in the exchange of symbolic capital in the literary field; however, prestige is not simply a question of the more interaction agents and authors have, the stronger the author’s standing. And while the model used as a framework for analysis in this study does not account for a number of factors, it is the authors who are absent from the model who, perhaps, answer the most pertinent question in this study: who has access to the symbolic capital that denotes ‘prestige’ in the literary field. Authors such as Christina Stead, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Franzen and Alice Walker are absent from the list of ‘most prestigious’; but these are names one would likely look out for, and whose absence is noticeable. Of the 2369 authors in this study who interact with more than one agent of consecration, 1395 (around 59%) are men and 974 (around 41%) are women. Twenty-four are First Nations women authors. This model highlights the under-representation of women authors in the exchange of symbolic capital between agent of consecration and author, and helps to explain why men continue to dominate the field, despite publishing fewer titles than women authors from around 2001.

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

183

Despite these limitations, this model is a helpful tool for observing the authors who interacted with multiple agents of consecration over the 50 years to 2015. Over the sample period, 237 authors interacted with all three agents of consecration in this study, that is, they, were reviewed in one of the sample publications, spoke at one of the sample literary festivals and were shortlisted for or won one of the sample literary prizes. Of these 237 most consecrated Australian authors, 44% are women and 56% men. In large parts, this list of authors accords with many speculative conversations about who might be included in an Australian literary canon: Alexis Wright, Helen Garner, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Lily Brett, Michelle de Kretser, Tony Birch, Richard Flanagan, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, J. M. Coetzee, Hannah Kent, Kim Scott, Tim Winton and Chloe Hooper are all present, and authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry are all represented.

How the Agents of Consecration Intersect Across the Literary Field Different agents of consecration occupy different positions in the hierarchy of the field, and each position in the hierarchy is associated with acquiring a different kind of prestige. This is evident in the way that the agents of consecration in the literary field work together to cement the legitimacy of an author and their cultural output. For example, a very small proportion of the 36,010 authors who were either reviewed, attended a festival or were shortlisted or won a literary prize interacted with all three of these institutions (around 0.7%), but a far greater proportion (around 6%) were reviewed and attended a festival. This suggests that the symbolic strength of each institution differs (Table 6.1). The position of an agent in the field—and, therefore, the value or strength of their symbolic capital—is associated with having a higher proportion of overlapping authors, because where it is common for a small proportion of the reviewed authors to be shortlisted for a literary prize, it would be expected that a high proportion of shortlisted authors would have also been reviewed. For literary prizes, there is a consistently strong overlap between the authors who have been shortlisted or who have won a literary prize and those were reviewed in the sample publications, or who have appeared in a literary festival program. Comparing literary prizes with book reviews—where there is a much smaller proportion of overlapping authors—it becomes clear that the authors who are

184

A. DANE

Table 6.1 Proportion of authors who interact with two agents of consecrationa Book reviews Book reviews Literary Festivals Literary Prizes

Literary festivals 7.0%

53.2% 96.1%

Literary prizes 1.0% 3.3%

50.8%

a A note on reading this table: take the rows as a starting point and read across to where they

intersect with each column to see the proportion of, for example, authors who are reviewed in the sample publications who are also shortlisted for or win a literary prize in the sample (1.0%). Or, looking at the authors who were shortlisted for or won one of the sample literary prizes, just over 12% of them were also included on one of the prescribed text lists survey for this study

shortlisted for or win a literary prize are much more likely than the authors who have been reviewed to have engaged with more than one agent of consecration. Similarly, there is quite a small proportion of authors who have appeared at Melbourne Writers Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week who have also won or been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, NSW Premier’s or Victorian Premier’s literary awards, but there is a high proportion of those winning and shortlisted authors who have appeared at the Melbourne Writers Festival or Adelaide Writers’ Week. This is because when it comes to agents with greater symbolic capital, the few authors who interact with them have previously interacted, and will likely go on to interact, with agents that occupy a different position in the hierarchy. And while this analysis points to the symbolic strength of literary prizes as consecratory agents, the importance and influence of book reviews and literary criticism should not be diminished. Just 13 of the 334 authors who were shortlisted for or won a literary prize in the sample analysed were not reviewed in ABR, The Age, or The Australian, which strongly suggests that book reviews in major newspapers and literary magazines is a primary hurdle for continued interaction with consecratory agents in the literary field. Changes Over Time This analysis also reveals how the ways in which the field has evolved over the past half century. Interaction between the agents of consecration increased over the five decades in this study, suggesting that there is now a lively and interrelated practice of recognition and reputation

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

185

building in the Australian literary field. Around three percent of the authors who interacted with multiple agents over the 50-year period did so in the decade 1965–1975, compared with over half of the authors who interacted with multiple agents in the decade 2006–2015 (Table 6.2). There was a noticeable jump in the number of authors engaging with multiple agents of consecration from the decade 1976–1985 to the decade 1986–1995, which could be attributed to the fact that a number of prizes and festivals were introduced in this period—the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were introduced in 1979, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were established in 1985 and the inaugural Melbourne Writers Festival occurred in 1986—giving authors a greater opportunity to engage with multiple sites of symbolic capital acquisition. Moreover, the number of authors each agent of consecration engaged with across the 50-year period grew: more book reviews, more authors in the literary festival program and more authors being shortlisted for and winning literary prizes (Table 6.3). There was an increase of more than 30 percentage points in the proportion of authors interacting with more than one agent of consecration in the three decades to 2015, which is broadly consistent with the growth Table 6.2 Change of agent interaction over time

Decade

Authors interacting with multiple agents (%)

1965–1975 1976–1986 1986–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

Table 6.3 Average no. authors engaging with each agent of consecration, per decade

Decade 1965–1975 1976–1985 1986–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

3.21 8.41 23.59 44.57 55.86

Book reviews

Literary festivals

Literary prizes

4782 3712 4099 5812 6045

173 448 902 2009 2399

10 33 38 41 47

186

A. DANE

in the average number of authors that each agent of consecration interacted with over the 30 years to 2015: the number of authors interacting with each agent increased over the 50-year period, as did the number of authors interacting with multiple agents. This indicates that not only did more authors had the opportunity to interact with multiple agents over the sample period, but also that individual authors engaged with more agents of consecration. The growth in the number of authors engaging with each agent of consecration is, perhaps, emblematic of their increasing presence and influence in the field. This increasing overlap between agents of consecration in the literary field from the mid-1980s accords with James English’s understating of the way the literary field has evolved. English (2005: 76) writes: What has transformed society since the 1970s is not the rise of a new class per se but the rise of a formidable institutional system of credentialing and consecrating that has increasingly monopolised the production and distribution of symbolic capital … while at the same time making the accumulation or control of such capital more and more necessary to almost any exercise of power.

The increase in the interaction between agents of consecration across the five decades suggests that, over the period 1965–2015, the Australian literary field, and the way symbolic capital is accumulated, and literary reputations and power is secured, has evolved. The Australian literary field is a close network where an author’s access to, for example, the literary festival stage is increasingly predicated on being reviewed in a major publication. This illustrates the power of each agent of consecration, especially the book review pages, and highlights the far-reaching effects of the symbolic violence enacted against particular groups when they are consistently and disproportionately overlooked. Of the 234 authors who won or were shortlisted for a literary prize and appeared at a literary festival (around 51% of the shortlisted/prizewinning authors), all the authors apart from one, poet Fiona Hile, were reviewed in either ABR, The Age or The Australian. This serves to support the notion that book reviews are important as a hurdle which authors must clear, and illustrates that as literary prizes and literary festivals have proliferated to the point where they are now seen as an essential part of the Australian literary landscape; it is increasingly common for authors with high standing in the literary field to remain ‘visible’ through

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

187

book reviews and by participating in writers’ festivals. However, the increasing prevalence of overlap between agents of consecration could signal a tempering of the power of each agent of consecration and indicate that the symbolic capital of an author increasingly relies on interaction with multiple agents of consecration, rather than just one. Either way, the influence of these agents over author reputations is increasingly interlinked and interdependent. The increasing overlap between agents that, at least notionally, engage with the aesthetic properties of a title, or exist to celebrate authors and literary culture, appears to be at odds with proclamations of the ‘declining literary paradigm’ wherein the publishing field has shifted from a culturally driven to a commercial/market-driven venture (Davis 2006: 49). Some argue that the increasingly sophisticated instruments used to measure book sales and reader engagement—among them Nielsen BookScan data, user reviews on biblio-centric social networking sites such as Goodreads, and engagement statistics extracted from ebook readers— together with changing bookselling practices and the declining popularity of literary titles, has led to a field-wide shift away from the long-standing mechanisms of literary taste production and circulation within the field of cultural production. The data analysed in this study does not challenge notions of changing publishing industry practice, however, the results of this analysis do suggest that, especially when it comes to the acquisition of symbolic capital within the field of cultural production, the practice of reputation building is increasingly dependent on a group of institutions dedicated to identifying and celebrating literary works, and the power of these institutions to shape literary tastes remains. Moreover, examining the practice of book reviewers and literary editors, festival programmers and literary prize judges as agents of consecration who exert their power within the literary field, the interaction between them and with authors has never been this strong. This speaks to their power as agents who seek to express that power by defining notions of literary merit and, through the consistent interaction of a small group of authors with agents of consecration across a number of years, ensure that the notions of literary value that secured their power are maintained. Rather than the decline of the literary paradigm, perhaps the results of this study indicate a shift in the literary paradigm in which the interrelation between agents of consecration in the field is an example of the importance of being both symbolically and economically viable as an actor in the contemporary literary field. Beth Driscoll (2014) identifies this

188

A. DANE

contemporary space as the new literary middlebrow. Middlebrow institutions that build literary reputations—such as literary festivals and literary prizes—are vital for occupying positions of power and being recognised, both within and beyond the field, as an author ‘worthy’ of discourse. That the interaction between agents of consecration has increased in the 30 years to 2015 only serves to demonstrate the shifting structure of the literary field, and that occupying and maintaining positions of power requires recognition from multiple sources.

Assessing the Influence of Each Agent of Consecration If we operate under the assumption that the more agents of consecration an author interacts with, the more symbolic capital they acquire—and therefore, the more power they have in the field—we can assert that, subject to the limitations noted above, the authors who are reviewed in major publications, appear on the writers’ festival stage and are shortlisted for major literary awards are likely to occupy positions of power in the field. The question is, then: what are the factors that help to obtain these positions of power, and do some agents of consecration hold more weight than others? Is an author more likely to be a powerful agent if they attract a large amount of critical attention; or is it the number of times they appear at a festival, or are shortlisted for a prize, that is important? Book reviews are a hurdle, or even a precursor, to an author’s ongoing engagement with consecratory institutions, but does that mean that more reviews can lead to more engagement? By analysing the 10 most reviewed authors in ABR, The Age and The Australian, the 10 authors with the highest number of Adelaide Writers’ Week and Melbourne Writers Festival appearances and the 10 authors who have been shortlisted for the most literary prizes in this sample, a more nuanced picture begins to emerge of the way symbolic capital is acquired in the literary field, and where the power lies. Eight of the 10 most reviewed authors do not appear in the list of 237 most prestigious authors who, in addition to being reviewed were also included in a literary festival line-up and were shortlisted for or won a literary prize; David Malouf and Rodney Hall are the only authors in the list of top 10 reviewed authors who interact with all three institutions of literary consecration examined in this study (Table 6.4). And in surveying the list of most reviewed authors, it is not until Peter Carey, the 18th most

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

189

Table 6.4 Top 10 reviewed authors, 1965–2015 Author

No. festivals 11

No. prizes

Peter Corris

No. reviews 102

No. decades 3

David Malouf

88

28

10

4

Rodney Hall

86

28

8

4

Thomas Shapcott Ross Fitzgerald

82

28

4

73

3

2

Geoffrey Dutton John Updike

71

10

3

69

1

1

Geoffrey Blainey Kerry Greenwood Margaret Atwood

68

11

4

65

25

2

63

5

2

Note Shaded cells indicate that authors did not interact with agent of consecration

reviewed author in the study, where there is another author who interacts with all three institutions. This indicates that while being reviewed in a major publication is an important part of accumulating symbolic capital, simply being the most reviewed author does not necessarily translate directly into literary reputation and power. It is not necessarily the volume of reviews but rather the fact that an author is regarded as a ‘must review’ by the literary editors that denotes prestige and power. With a total of 45 reviews across the period, Helen Garner is the 29th most reviewed author in this study; however, almost every title she has published across the period 1965– 2015 has been reviewed in at least one of the three publications in the sample. Looking at Peter Corris, who is the most reviewed author in the study, further supports the notion that it is not the volume of reviews but the status of a ‘must review’ author that counts. Corris is an Australian crime writer who was reviewed frequently in the ABR’s crime column that ran in the mid-to-late 1990s. And while Corris has won a number of awards for crime writing, he has never won or been shortlisted for any of the awards included in this study, awards that are considered among the most prestigious in the Australian literary field. Margaret Atwood is

190

A. DANE

another author who was among the most reviewed across ABR, The Age and The Australian, and could arguably be considered a ‘must review’ author. Although she has spoken at five Adelaide Writers’ Weeks and has won dozens of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize in 2000 and 2019, as a Canadian citizen and resident she is ineligible for the prizes examined in this study. This shows that just relying on book reviews to identify the position an author occupies in the literary field is misguided, and that the actions taken by multiple agents in the field need to be taken into consideration. This analysis also highlights a number of factors about the way symbolic capital is distributed to authors in the Anglophone literary field. The fact that Peter Corris and Kerry Greenwood were among the most reviewed, both authors who also appeared at a number of literary festivals, illustrates the limited access that crime writing, and genre fiction more generally, has to the most prestigious literary prizes in the literary field. Here we again see the ways in which the consecratory practices of institutions such as literary prizes instil and maintain broad perceptions, assumptions and predispositions around what constitutes literature with a capital L. That there are just two women, Kerry Greenwood and Margaret Atwood, among the most reviewed from the 50 years to 2015 is indicative of the broader challenges women face in the literary field in building their reputations through interaction with agents of consecration. And even though book reviews may be limited in their consecratory abilities, the book review pages of the major publications can act as a barrier between the author and interaction with other agents of consecration in the literary field. Agitating for equal access is paramount. Table 6.5 details the authors who have made the highest number of appearances at Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival. There appears to be a closer connection between writers who have amassed the highest number of writers’ festival appearances and those who, by the metrics of this study, are the most symbolically wealthy, but there is still a significant gap between the authors with the most festival appearances and those considered ‘most prestigious’ by the metrics of this study: eight of the 13 authors (Table 6.5). Of the authors who appeared at the highest number of literary festivals, five of the authors—Carmel Bird, Helen Garner, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Alex Miller and David Malouf—were also reviewed in one or more of the sample publications and won or were shortlisted for one of the sample

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

191

Table 6.5 Top 10 festival appearances, 1966–2015 Author

No. reviews 17

No. festivals 48

Sophie Cunningham Ramona Koval

13

36

2

16

34

2

Morag Fraser

3

34

1

Carmel Bird

50

33

3

Helen Garner

45

30

26

4

Chris WallaceCrabbe Michael Cathcart Judith Rodriguez Alex Miller

55

29

1

4

13

29

3

14

29

4

36

28

12

3

David Malouf

88

28

10

4

Arnold Zable

No. prizes 2

No. decades 3

2

Barry Hill

42

28

5

4

Dorothy Porter

30

28

2

4

literary prizes. This indicates that appearing at a greater number of festivals is more closely associated with high levels of power, or the potential to attract symbolic capital, than being reviewed a greater number of times: of the 237 authors who accumulated symbolic capital from all three agents of consecration in this study, just over 1% of them were among the top 10 most reviewed authors, but around 7% of them were among the authors who appeared at the most festivals. Moreover, just over half of those who appeared at the most literary festivals were women, a stark contrast to the list of most reviewed authors, which suggests that despite the low representation of women in book reviews there is a stronger representation of women among the more symbolically significant literary festivals. This is to be expected for a number of reasons. First, women have typically been strongly represented in literary festival programs, a much stronger representation than the proportion of women authors reviewed in ABR, The Age and The Australian. Second, despite the fact that women are more strongly represented in the festival program, they are less likely than their male counterparts to participate in the most coveted

192

A. DANE

events such as the keynote address or an ‘in conversation’ event, and are more likely to act in a facilitating, moderating or supportive role on the festival stage. However, this group of 10 authors is not emblematic of the broader trends that define the relationship between gender and literary festival programming. Of the authors who appeared at the most literary festivals in the sample, there is a number who gave keynote addresses, appeared at in conversation events and participated in panel discussions, not just as the moderator but also as the featured author. This speaks to position of power that these authors occupy in the field, and the prestige attached to speaking at multiple festivals across multiple decades. Table 6.6 details the authors who were shortlisted for or won the most literary prizes in this study’s sample and what emerges from this analysis is that it is an author’s interaction with literary prizes that denotes the most accumulated prestige, drawn not just from the literary prize itself but also from book reviews and literary festivals. All of the most shortlisted authors from the years 1965–2015 could be considered among the most powerful in the contemporary Australian publishing field, indicating that being shortlisted for multiple literary prizes in this study’s sample is perhaps the strongest indicator of an author’s accumulated power in the field, according to the combined metrics used in this study. There are two other interesting factors that emerge from this list of most shortlisted/prize-winning authors. First, Table 6.6 Top 10 prize shortlists, 1965–2015 Author Peter Carey Alex Miller David Malouf Richard Flanagan Sonya Hartnett Thea Astley Brian Castro Helen Garner Gail Jones J. M. Coetzee Murray Bail Robert Adamson

No. reviews

No. festivals

No. prizes

No. decades

55 36 88 22 34 43 29 45 24 46 29 42

7 28 28 13 23 14 12 30 20 6 2 7

15 12 10 10 9 9 9 8 8 8 8 8

4 3 4 3 3 4 4 4 2 2 3 4

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

193

all but one of the authors on the list—Gail Jones—are not only shortlisted authors but also prize winners; and second, all but one—Robert Adamson, who won a poetry prize—won or were shortlisted for fiction prizes. That the most shortlisted authors are almost all prize winners, and considered powerful agents in the field, speaks to the narrow definition of prize-winning writing that is deployed in the judging of Australian literary prizes, and that the same authors are being shortlisted for and winning the same prizes again and again and despite the fact that winning a literary prize only rarely guarantees a spot on the bestseller list, this indicates that there are ongoing and significant symbolic rewards associated with winning literary prizes. Around a third of the most shortlisted authors are women. And while this is higher than the proportion of women who were among the most reviewed, it is smaller than the proportion of women among all those who had the most festival appearances. This indicates that appearing at a literary festival can carry more symbolic weight for a woman author, and that the ‘visibility’ that comes with a literary festival appearance is another essential factor for women when building their careers and reputations. I will explore the relationship between women authors, literary festivals and prestige in more detail in the following section. A literary prize is the strongest indicator—when compared with book reviews or literary festival appearances—that an author will occupy a position of power in the Australian literary field.

The Influence of Symbolic Capital Beyond the Field of Cultural Production To assess the relationship between symbolic capital as measured in this study and the bookselling marketplace I cross-referenced the top-50 bestselling authors from 2003 to 2015 with the 2368 authors who interacted with more than one agent of consecration in this study, highlighting those authors who also interacted with all four agents of consecration. Around 4%, or 114 authors, of the 2365 who interact with multiple agents of consecration could be considered to be both symbolically wealthy and economically viable. This is an important combination in a field where the commercial considerations appear to be of ever-increasing importance: 60% of this powerful group are men and 40% are women authors.

194

A. DANE

The different ways in which authors interacted with the various agents of consecration across the field may influence their position in the marketplace. Those who were reviewed and appeared at literary festivals make up the largest proportion (around 51%) of these powerful authors. This could be explained by the fact that book reviews and literary festivals are reader-focused institutions: for some the utility of a book review is less about critically engaging with the themes, plot and characters and more about recommending the book to readers; and what are literary festivals without the literary festival audience? But I think that there is a simpler explanation. This group is full of great authors who, for one reason or another, would not typically win or be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin or NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Literary Awards. For example, the authors who write genre fiction—authors like Anita Heiss, Monica McInerney and Di Morrissey, who are often bestsellers—are consistently reviewed in the major publications, and draw impressive literary festival crowds. Similarly, a large number of authors in this group are not Australian and while they are ineligible for the Miles or the Premier’s awards, they are bestsellers in Australia, attract critical attention in Australian reviewing publications, and occasionally grace the Australian writers’ festival stage: Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Donna Tartt and Eleanor Catton among them. Around 30% of the 73 authors who interact with all three agents of consecration, the most symbolically wealthy in this study, are also bestsellers (Table 6.7). There are equal numbers of men and women in this group of authors with accumulated symbolic and economic capital, indicating that women appear to outperform men when it comes to converting their symbolic capital to economic capital. And although women authors constitute just 41% of the authors who interact with prizes, festivals and reviews, this does not appear to be a barrier to parity among the most powerful. It is also important to reiterate that, overall, 39% of the bestselling authors who also interact with multiple agents of consecration are women, but 50% of the authors who are both bestsellers and have the highest accumulated symbolic capital are women. There is just one author of colour, Michelle de Kretser, on this list of the most symbolically and economically wealthy authors, again highlighting the powerful position that white women occupy in the literary field. This suggests that women authors in Australia, who rarely attract the level of critical attention from reviewers, judges or festival organisers afforded to their male counterparts, have a different relationship with symbolic and economic capital than men who

6

195

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

Table 6.7 Authors with high symbolic and economic capital, 2003–2015 Author Lily Brett Geraldine Brooks Peter Carey Michelle de Kretser Rosemary Dobson Robert Drewe Richard Flanagan Anna Funder Helen Garner Kate Grenville Gwen Harwood Chloe Hooper Paul Kelly Cate Kennedy Hannah Kent David Malouf Alex Miller Les Murray Peter Porter Craig Silvey Peter Temple Tim Winton

No. reviews

No. festivals

No. prizes

No. decades

35 18 55 20 25 63 22 5 45 37 15 9 20 23 2 88 36 68 46 7 22 44

4 6 7 11 2 23 13 5 30 26 12 9 7 16 3 28 28 16 17 3 14 6

4 6 15 6 2 6 10 3 8 7 1 4 1 2 1 10 12 5 2 3 2 7

2 2 4 2 2 3 3 2 4 3 1 2 2 2 1 4 3 4 3 2 2 4

are bestsellers. For women, the symbolic capital associated with winning or being shortlisted for a literary prize might just carry more commercial weight than it does for a man. This also indicates that agents of consecration are out of step with the marketplace and that those who buy the books written by the ‘most prestigious’ authors do not subscribe to the field’s rigid and often outdated relationship with gender. Or, perhaps the rigid master-patterns of literary taste that are established throughout one’s school years—master-patterns that inform the relationship between gender and prestige in the field—have a stronger influence over the actions within the field of cultural production than they do outside. Research into the reading habits of Australians (Throsby et al. 2017) shows that women make up the majority (61%) of ‘frequent readers’, that is, those who read 10 or more books a year. This could explain why, among the most symbolically and economically wealthy authors in the

196

A. DANE

Australian field, women authors are equally represented. This is reminiscent of the gendered reviewing patterns of reviewers in ABR, The Age and The Australian, in which women reviewers typically review a fairly even mix of titles written by men and titles written by women, while men tend to review titles written by men. This once again serves to highlight why it is vital for editors, reviewers, prize judges and festival programmers to address their unconscious biases around gender and race.

The Relationship Between Gender and Accumulated Symbolic Capital Women represent around 41% of the 2368 authors who interact with multiple agents of consecration over the 50-year period, and, of the approximately seven percent of authors who have high levels of accumulated symbolic wealth, 59% of them are men. This figure remains fairly consistent among the 237 authors who interacted with all three agents of consecration: around 44% of these authors are women. The unequal representation of women authors among the most consecrated authors highlights the fact that because women authors are continually under-represented in, for example, the book review pages they are not afforded the same access to the positions of power within the field that comes with recognition from multiple agents of consecration. The under-representation of women when it comes to each individual agent of consecration translates into fewer women who have the opportunity to assume positions of power. There is one interaction between the agents of consecration where the gap between men and women is particularly narrow: women authors account for around 46% of the authors who have either won or been shortlisted for one of the prizes in this sample, and been reviewed in ABR, The Age or The Australian. This, perhaps, could be explained by looking at all seven literary prizes together: there is an more closely aligned number of shortlisted men and women (55% men, 45% women). However, when other agents of consecration are brought into the mix, the proportion of women authors begins to decrease. And while women make up around 46% of authors who are reviewed and win literary prizes, they make up 44% of the authors who interact with reviews, prizes and festivals. At first it might appear that prize-winning women are less likely than their male counterparts to translate their interaction with literary prize shortlists into other capital-building activities; however,

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

197

this is not necessarily the case. Of the 87 authors who interacted with just reviews and prizes—of whom 46% are women—the majority, around 84%, won or were shortlisted for just one literary prize. And the majority of authors across fiction, non-fiction and poetry who won multiple prizes in the sample period were men. Among authors who engaged with book reviews, literary prizes and literary festivals—where the representation of women sits at around 44%—the proportion who either won or were shortlisted for just one prize from 1965 to 2015 dropped to 60%. Rather than an indicator that women are struggling to convert the symbolic capital acquired from reviews and prizes into increased interactions with other consecratory agents in the field, winning multiple literary prizes might be a stronger indicator of an author who sits in a position of power and engages with sites of symbolic capital field-wide. This is perhaps why men are so strongly represented among the most symbolically wealthy authors in this study. Changes Over Time The relationship between prescribed lists of study, book reviews, writers’ festivals and literary prizes has evolved over the five decades to 2015. So too has the representation of women authors among the most prestigious in the field (Table 6.8). The pattern of growth for the proportion of women interacting with multiple agents of consecration is similar to that seen with the proportion of women represented in book reviews and a number of literary prizes. What is commonly seen with individual consecratory institutions is a sharp increase in the representation of women authors through the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a plateau into the three decades to 2015. This commonly seen pattern only serves to reinforce Table 6.8 Authors who interact with multiple agents of consecration

Decade 1965–1975 1976–1985 1986–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

M authors (%)

W authors (%)

86 68 58 59 57

14 32 42 41 43

198

A. DANE

Table 6.9 Authors who interact with three agents of consecration: book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes

Decade 1965–1975 1976–1985 1986–1995 1996–2005 2006–2015

M authors (%)

W authors (%)

86 59 60 56 59

14 41 40 44 44

the notion that a ceiling exists for the representation of women in positions of power in the literary field, a ceiling that does not accord with the literary output of Australian women writers. Moreover, this pattern is even more pronounced when it comes to the authors who could be considered the most powerful in the field (Table 6.9). The proportion of women among those who could be considered most powerful in the field appears to have plateaued; the proportion of powerful women in the decade 1976–1985 is almost equal to the proportion in the decade 2006–2015. It is important to address, once again, what it means to occupy positions of power within the literary field and why equal and proportionate access between men and women authors is worthy of consideration. For Bourdieu (1993), authors and other agents in the literary field are in a constant struggle for positions of power. A number of factors can influence the acquisition of positions of power within the field, but an essential component of power is accumulated symbolic capital, which is acquired through the interactions with, and declarations from, other powerful agents. This interaction can be seen as an articulation of an author’s legitimacy. Such a power carries with it the authority to determine the parameters of cultural and literary value and, therefore, the opportunity to maintain one’s position through the constant rearticulation of what is valuable. The unequal access to positions of power in the Australian literary field for women authors is the result of symbolic violence, and a continuous rearticulation by the authors who have long dominated the field. Why should one group have the disproportionate opportunity to define and maintain the standards of literary value in the Australian field? Without equal access to positions of power it is possible that women will be destined to fit within the boundaries drawn for them, never taking up more than around 40% of the space.

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

199

The Whiteness of the Symbolically Wealthy Despite the consistent under-representation of women authors within consecratory institutions, never is the expanding privilege of white women authors more evident that when the list of 237 of the country’s most prestigious authors is interrogated. Where 101 (or around 43%) of the authors who were reviewed in ABR, The Age and/or The Australian, appeared at Adelaide Writers Week and/or the Melbourne Writers Festival, and were shortlisted for or won a literary prize were white women, there are 11 authors of colour (that is, around 5%) in this group. Approximately nine times as many white women authors are in this group as there are authors of colour. And just as the systemic disregard of women’s writing within these institutions has established and continues to reinforce a particular taste structure that privileges the production and celebration of the writing of men, so too does this structure continue to privilege the production and celebration of the writing of white authors.

A Closer Look: 10 Symbolically Wealthy Authors What, then, is the path authors take throughout their careers to build their reputation through repeated engagement with agents of consecration, acquiring symbolic capital along the way? Examining the way that 10 authors, all with significant accumulated symbolic capital, interacted with the four agents of consecration of this study over a number of decades can shed some light on the way these agents work together to contribute to an author’s standing in the literary field. Looking at the way that Helen Garner, Alexis Wright, Michelle de Kretser, Anna Funder, Sonya Hartnett, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, David Malouf, J. M. Coetzee and Tim Winton have engaged with the book reviewers, literary festivals and literary prizes illustrates how repeated selection and recognition by agents of consecration translates into literary prestige. This is not a representative sample of authors; rather, it is a closer look at a group of authors with significant accumulated symbolic capital. These 10 authors, drawn from the list of 237 most prestigious authors, have been selected for analysis for a number of reasons. First, they represent an even number of men and women authors. Second, they are all authors with significant accumulated symbolic capital and could all be considered among the most recognisable names in the Australian literary field. All of the authors have won or been shortlisted for multiple literary

200

A. DANE

prizes, have spoken at literary festivals and have been reviewed by the major publications. Among the 10 authors are a Nobel Prize winner, multiple Booker Prize winners and seven Miles Franklin winners; and four of the authors—Helen Garner, Anna Funder, Tim Winton and David Malouf—appear on the bestseller lists analysed in this study. I am interested in seeing how these particular authors, whose established literary reputations indicate that their writing is worthy of consideration and admiration, engage with agents of consecration (Table 6.10). What emerges from this analysis is the stark difference between the way the men and women authors interact with agents of consecration in the field. Take, for instance, the authors in this group who have won or been shortlisted for the most literary prizes—Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Sonya Hartnett, J. M. Coetzee and Helen Garner—and the relationship between winning a prize and speaking at a literary festival. The three men in this group of authors, Carey, Winton and Coetzee, won and were shortlisted for a number of prizes in this study’s sample but did not really engage with many literary festivals across the period. On the other hand the women, Garner and Hartnett, spoke at 30 and 23 of the sample literary festivals, respectively. For the 10 authors in this sample, on average the men appeared at 12 festivals across the period; the women spoke at 16 festivals. This suggests that for prestigious authors, the relationship that women authors have to literary festivals is different to that of men. Perhaps these men don’t feel the need to appear at literary festivals. Perhaps the perceptions about literary festivals—that they are too commercial, that the audience are predominantly women—make them Table 6.10 Authors with significant accumulated symbolic capital Author Peter Carey J. M. Coetzee Michelle de Kretser Anna Funder Helen Garner Sonya Hartnett David Malouf Kim Scott Tim Winton Alexis Wright

No. reviews

No. festivals

No. prizes

No. decades

55 47 20 5 46 33 88 9 44 13

7 6 11 6 30 23 28 15 6 12

10 8 6 3 7 9 7 4 10 6

4 2 2 2 4 3 4 3 4 2

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

201

an unattractive if unnecessary promotional avenue, that if they are not a requirement for symbolic or economic capital acquisition, they present an unwelcome distraction. Conversely, perhaps women authors feel the need to be seen and be present in these public manifestations of the literary field. Perhaps the security of forgoing a literary festival panel appearance is a luxury few women experience. The fear of slipping out of view, of losing relevance to readers, critics, judges, is perhaps what keeps Helen Garner and Sonya Hartnett at these events. Of the authors I spoke to for this project, none professed a love of the writers’ festival stage. Some authors don’t like the spotlight; others see it as a necessary, if rather tedious, part of their professional practice: I don’t hate them. It’s not my favourite part of the job, but I think I recognise, or I believe, that it’s important. And yeah, as I said, like, I don’t love it, but it also doesn’t fill me with nausea. (Jennifer Down, author 2018) That is part of your obligation as a practitioner, as a writer, to your publisher. To be seen, to make yourself available. And in fact, the real reason you are there is to provide some access to a public that is reading you but it is also a vehicle for you to promote the work. Am I excited about appearing? I am not excited at all. (Mark Henshaw, author 2016)

If the general consensus among authors is that appearing on the writers’ festival stage is a necessary part of their occupation, and is perhaps fuelled by a fear of being forgotten, in light of the data presented in this study it isn’t difficult to see why on average prestigious women authors are speaking at more literary festivals across their careers than their male counterparts. But not all writers’ festival events are created equal. The prestige attached to an ‘in conversation’ event and a keynote address carries more symbolic weight than being a member of a five-person panel discussing ‘why women write’. On average, the women and the men in this sample were involved in almost equal numbers of ‘in conversation’ one-on-one events: 24% of the events Malouf, Winton, Carey, Scott and Coetzee were involved with were ‘in conversation’, as were 25% of the events Garner, Hartnett, Funder, Wright and de Kretser appeared in. However, when it came to keynote addresses—arguably the most coveted spot in the festival program—on average 27% of the festival events that the men in this sample spoke at were keynotes, compared to just 4% of the events the women were involved in. That just 4% of the events

202

A. DANE

that women authors—women authors with long careers and established reputations—were involved with at Adelaide Writers’ Week and/or the Melbourne Writers Festival are keynote addresses speaks to the potential fear women authors may have that once they are out of the public line of sight they will disappear. That their work is not enduring. That they need to engage with writers’ festivals in order to be visible, even when they are not afforded the same access to the speakers’ podium. Tim Winton, Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee, who made an average of 6.3 appearances each over 40 years might not experience this same fear. The relationship of the two First Nations authors in this sample, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, with agents of consecration in the literary field is important to explore. This analysis reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly, the limited exposure and lack of critical attention afforded to First Nations authors within the book pages of the weekend newspapers and literary magazines, even when it comes to authors with significant and longestablished symbolic capital: both these authors are Miles Franklin Award winners. On average, titles written by Scott and Wright were reviewed 11 times across the sample period and the average for the non-Indigenous authors in the sample was 42 reviews. Yet, despite this limited critical attention, when it came to the number of prizes in the sample that Wright and Scott either won or were shortlisted for, the gap between the First Nations authors and the non-Indigenous authors begins to close. On average over the period, Wright and Scott won or were shortlisted for five literary prizes; for the non-Indigenous authors the average was eight, suggesting that the First Nations authors, in this limited sample, outperform their non-Indigenous counterparts when it comes to converting critical attention from review into literary prize shortlistings. That Scott and Wright have been reviewed fewer times and have been shortlisted or won fewer prizes is more broadly emblematic of the gap between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors in the Australian literary field. Just 46 First Nations authors (just over 1%) engaged with multiple agents of consecration across the period 1965–2015. And while the proportion of First Nations authors interacting with multiple agents of consecration across the period did increase, a familiar pattern emerges from breaking the data down decade by decade (Table 6.11). While the numbers are extremely small, it is clear that the distribution of symbolic capital to First Nations authors did increase throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. However, this increase was not sustained into the final period of the study and there was a drop, by around 0.17

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

203

Table 6.11 First nations authors who interact with multiple agents of consecration Decade 1965-1975 1976-1985 1986-1995 1996-2005 2006-2015

No authors

% Authors

6 10 27 23

0.25% 0.42% 1.14% 0.97%

percentage points, in the proportion of First Nations authors interacting with multiple agents of consecration. Again, it appears that progress towards equal access to power in the literary field is slowing (or in this case is non-existent), pointing towards a shift in the habitus of the field towards more conservative practice.

Transforming Structures of Power Considering the data explored in this chapter, it appears that the symbolic capital gender gap still has some way to go if it is to close. That there has been a three percentage point increase in the proportion of women authors interacting with multiple agents of consecration over the 3 decades to 2015 only serves to highlight the rigidity of the literary field and the dispositions that serve to regulate positions of power. This is a pattern that is seen again and again throughout this study: a sharp increase in the proportion of women in the book review pages of the Saturday newspapers, on a non-fiction prize shortlist, and in the literary festival program, followed by a plateau that ensures that the proportion of space taken up by women authors almost never exceeds 50%. And when it comes to the most symbolically rich authors, those who interact with multiple agents of consecration over multiple decades, the proportion of women in this select group has seen so little growth, to the point where women make up ostensibly the same proportion of these ‘prestigious’ authors in the decade 1976–1985 as they did in 2006–2015. This lack of progress is, perhaps, the most compelling evidence for the influence that the habitus of powerful individuals has on the field of cultural production, and the difficulties of enacting change in the way the actions of authors in the literary field translate to positions of power. Former Stella Prize manager, Veronica Sullivan (2017), spoke with me about why it is so difficult to shift the perceptions and assumptions that pervade the field, saying:

204

A. DANE

We are all raised in a culture that values men’s voices more highly, and we all internalise those messages, and it is more about how you unlearn them and how you become conscious of them so you can start to dismantle them.

Publicist Alice Lewinsky also spoke about ingrained messages around gender, literary prestige and perceptions of merit: The content female writers tend to be dealing with is seen as less literary. So male writers are, even if they are writing a domestic drama, it is brought up because it is this important male perspective because they are bringing this male vision to the domestic. Whereas if it is a female writer writing about the domestic it is seen as something they know intimately, even it is seen as something that is easier for them to write about because it is ‘their world’ so to speak, and that decreases the prestige around that book and I think will translate to a lack of awards and recognition.

This notion was echoed by former literary editor and literary critic Susan Wyndham, who said: It’s true that there have always been very talented, strong women writers who have probably missed out just because of all sorts of set-in-stone ways and all the factors that come into it.

We must acknowledge the stronghold that particular beliefs around authors, merit and cultural worth have over the way in which authors interact within the literary field, and that perceptions around literary ‘greatness’ and literary reputation exist not in a vacuum but are constructed. These perceptions ensure the power of white men in the literary field. In 1975, Anne Summers wrote about the position of women in Australian culture in Damned Whores and God’s Police. Reflecting on the history of Australia since invasion, and the relationship between gender, race, class and cultural expression, Summers explored how the attitudes towards women in Australian artistic and cultural spheres, and beyond, were influencing the critical reception and symbolic position of literature written by women authors. Summers (1975: 33) engages with notions of the disposition of the field of cultural production, although her book was published prior to the publication of Bourdieu’s concept of the field. She writes:

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

205

Where women have participated in Australian culture it has had to be with due acquiescence to a game whose rules were drawn up without their consent. They have had to conform to what men assured them was important … I am arguing that there has existed throughout Australian history a systematic omission of women from what have been judged the highest achievements in any field.

The state Summers describes here is the status quo of the literary field in 1970s Australia, a field wherein women participate according to the rules set up by the agents who occupy positions of power. Summers (1975: 35) goes on to describe the dichotomy that influences the actions of agents within the field, a structure informed by Modernist assumptions: Female art forms have simply been adjudged to occupy a distinct universe, one which is apart from and inferior to the male, which is unselfconsciously upheld as the universal model.

And, while this dichotomy may read as extreme or even irrelevant to the contemporary Australian publishing field, it is a notion explored by Katherine Bode (2008: 445)—‘the notion that men write serious, masculine novels and women write frivolous, feminine fiction’—and by Beth Driscoll (2014), as a factor that continues to inform the production of belief (Bourdieu 1993) in the cultural value of texts and their authors. Summers (1975: 52) concludes by noting that a shift in the status quo of the literary field—a shift away from the structures that uncritically observe the writing of men to be more culturally legitimate than the writing of women—will only come about if men acknowledge, read and ‘seriously’ critically engage with writing by women. However, on average the proportion of titles written by women and reviewed by men in ABR, The Age and The Australian has increased by just 7 percentage points since the decade 1976–1986: in the period 2006–2015 on average around 23% of the titles men reviewed were written by women. Could it be that, when it comes to the authors with significant accumulated symbolic capital, those who occupy the positions of power in the contemporary Australian literary field, there has been little change since 1975? The significance of the 1970s and 1980s in the history of the Anglophone publishing, and in particular the relationship between gender and the Anglophone publishing field, is important to examine. The fact that

206

A. DANE

a consistent pattern emerges in the data collected for this research— wherein the proportion of predominantly white women rose sharply into the late-1970s and early 1980s and effectively plateaued thereafter—speaks volumes about both the difficulty of transforming the field and the environment that facilitated the sharp increase in the proportion of white women authors engaging with consecratory institutions from the 1960s to the 1980s. The advent of second-wave feminism, which saw the ‘development of [a] liberal feminist impulse among white middle-class women’, ushered in a whole host of feminist publishing and literary movements and the establishment of feminist publishing publications and collectives (Travis 2008: 277). Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) were among a group of second-wave publications that signalled an emerging feminist consciousness and made explicit the ties between the social movement and the publishing industry (Foster 2016: 827). The Women in Print Movement was a radical collective of women in publishing in North America, whose work advocated for a transformation of the means of cultural production and the structures of power within the publishing industry (Travis 2008). This feminist separatist collective was established in the 1970s, alongside similar—albeit perhaps less radical—institutions with similar goals, such as Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press in the US, and the Women’s Press and Virago Press in the UK (Murray 2004). I argue that this fertile environment for feminist agitation and institutional change throughout this period was the reason why representation of women within consecratory institutions grew so rapidly into the 1980s. The question of why this progress stalled is a theme that runs through this research. Activist intervention in book reviewing in the US and the UK from the Women in Publishing collective and the author Marylin French in the late 1970s and 1980s had short-lived effects but were ultimately unsuccessful. And, while the results of the VIDA Count in the US—which since 2009 has documented, among other things, the gender gap predominantly in US publications—has generated significant media coverage and field-wide discussion, on average the results show that rarely do women represent more than 30% of the authors reviewed annually (VIDA 2019). A similar phenomenon can be observed in the realm of women and literary prizes: the introduction of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 1996 has had no significant influence over the representation

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

207

of women winners in major UK literary prizes such as the Booker Prize or the Costa Book Award, and the introduction of the Stella Prize to the Australian field does not appear to have inspired a field-wide change in the proportion of women winning literary prizes. Rather than transforming the existing structures of power in the literary field, the progress brought about by the social and cultural movements associated with second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, I suspect subconsciously, established a new structure that privileged the writing of white women but never beyond a certain ceiling of around 40%, so that the dominance of white male writing and white male literary power remained undisturbed.

Bringing About Meaningful Change On the eve of the 2018 Stella Prize announcement, Aviva Tuffield, publisher and former executive director of the Stella Prize, wrote an oped in The Age newspaper about the contribution that the Stella Prize has made to publishing and writing in terms of progressing the position of women in the Australian literary field. Tuffield (2018) explained how the Stella Prize had brought about a shift in the perception of writing by women, especially when it comes to literary prizes. This shift is in part borne out in the data explored in Chapter 5: 50% of the winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, 45% of the winners of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and 33% of the winners of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in the decade 2006–2015 were written by women. Tuffield echoes Anne Summers (1975) in her observation that the real work of the Stella Prize has been that writing by women is now ‘being taken more seriously’. However, 43 years after Summers published Damned Whores and God’s Police, Tuffield notes the perceptions around writing by women that still sit just below the surface of the literary field: ‘When Stella started many people told me that they didn’t realise there were so many good women writers in Australia—especially writers of nonfiction’. And while the data presented in this chapter would suggest that this perception around Australian women writers abounds, and Tuffield acknowledges that ‘things can slip back very quickly’, she is optimistic about the long-lasting changes that the Stella Prize will have on the contemporary Australian literary sphere. But changing the disposition and practice of individuals working within the field of cultural production will take more than the introduction of a women’s literary prize.

208

A. DANE

Tuffield is right to be concerned about the possibility that the perceptions of women writers in the Australian field will revert to ideas around literary value, significance and gender that defined the era in which Summers’ Damned Whores was published. And while there is a small amount of evidence to suggest that the introduction of the Stella Prize has had a short-term effect on the ways fiction prizes are judged—perhaps establishing a consciousness of the role that gender plays in the way one engages with a text—the Stella Count, which was designed to shine a light on the gender disparity in book reviews, is not having the same positive effect. And while it could be argued that winning a literary prize carries more weight in the literary field than a book review, this analysis shows that over 90% of the authors who won or were shortlisted for a literary prize from 1965 to 2015 were also reviewed in ABR, The Age or The Australian, highlighting the way that book reviews exist as a hurdle over which authors must jump. As the interaction between agents of consecration intensifies, and an increasing proportion of authors interact with multiple agents of consecration, the gender gap in book reviews, writers’ festival keynote speakers and prescribed text lists should not be overlooked. Addressing the education system and the texts that students engage with in their final years in school is, perhaps, the way to ensure a fieldwide, long-term transformation. Ensuring that the texts and authors that contribute to an individual’s master-pattern of cultural understanding and literary taste represent a varied group of genders, races, sexualities and classes is as important as a variation in genre and form. When an individual is informed from an early age that the texts worthy of critical analysis, discourse and rigorous engagement are not just written by William Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, Patrick White, Anton Chekhov and George Orwell, but are also written by Alexis Wright, Zadie Smith, Alice Walker, Melissa Lucashenko and Andrea Goldsmith, this ‘sentimental canon’ (Dolin et al. 2017)—this heterogeneous conception of literary expression—helps to establish the foundation of their actions within and beyond the field of cultural production. Working with the foundations, with the habitus of the literary field that guides the accumulation of symbolic capital and access to positions of power, is perhaps the only way to ensure long-term changes to the ways that consecratory institutions interact critically with women authors and their writing. One need only look back to the activism of Margaret Cooter et al. (1987), Dale Spender (1989), and Marilyn French (in Spender 1989) and the contemporary

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

209

Stella Count to see that changing the Australian literary field takes more than an awareness campaign that illuminates disparity. A transformation in the way that perceptions and assumptions around writing by women are established can be achieved by ensuring that students engage with text beyond the traditional Western canon. Parity among men and women, however, is a moot point unless the representation of writers of colour, disabled writers, working-class writers and LGBTIQ writers is championed. The advancement of white women authors should not come at the cost of women of colour, just so that white men can still occupy 50% of the available space. First Nations women authors are continually denied access to the institutions that establish literary reputations and more work is required to further understand the intersection of race, class and sexuality with the accumulation of prestige in the literary field. Upon winning the 2018 Stella Prize, Alexis Wright (2018) provided a glimmer of hope for the future of the Australian publishing field, and the continued evolution and inclusion of voices. She said: The great celebration today is that we have many exciting, diverse voices in the world of Australian letters. We encompass the world right here in our literature. And even in this shortlist that has been judged as being some of the very best of women’s literature published in the past year, we demonstrate our remarkable diversity, internationalism, and maturity as people of many backgrounds, and here including Indonesia, Iran, Sri Lanka, as well as two Aboriginal writers. A literary dialogue that allows us to have greater knowledge and understanding of each other, and acceptance of difference, and respect for each other in our diversity, is what will make Australian literature truly marvellous, relevant and far stronger than it has ever been.

Dismantling the long-held values around the kinds of authors who write texts that are ‘worthy’ of discussion, engagement and celebration is the only way to bring about meaningful and lasting change the structure of the Australian literary field. Grassroots initiatives like the Stella Prize, SWEATSHOP and the Western Sydney Writers Group, Djed Press and Women in Literary Arts Australia are working towards a more inclusive and equitable literary field where the white male voice is no longer dominant.

210

A. DANE

References Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Davis M (2006) The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing. Heat 12: 91–108. Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (2017) Conditional Assent: Literary Value and the Value of English as a Subject. In: Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (eds) Required Reading: Literature in Australian Schools Since 1945. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 3–19. Down J (2018) Interview, 28 March. Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. English J (2005) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foster L (2016) Spreading the Word: Feminist Print Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Women’s History Review 25(5): 812–831. Henshaw M (2016) Interview, 10 October. Murray S (2004) Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics. London, Stirling, and Virginia: Pluto Press. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Sullivan V (2017) Inerview, 29 March. Summers A (1975) Damned Whores and God’s Police. Melbourne: Penguin. Throsby D et al. (2017) Australian Book Readers: Survey Methods and Results. Macquarie Economics Research Papers. Available at: http://www.australia council.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/australian-book-readers-24-05-592 762e0c3ade.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2018. Travis T (2008) The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications. Book History 11(1): 275–300. Tuffield A (2018) What Difference Can a Book Prize for Women Make? Lots, Actually. The Age, 11 April. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/entert ainment/books/what-difference-can-a-book-prize-for-woman-make-lots-act ually-20180411-p4z90l.html. Accessed 15 July 2018.

6

INTERSECTING AND INTERACTING AGENTS OF CONSECRATION …

211

VIDA Women in the Literary Arts (2019) VIDA Count Archives. Available at: https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/previous-counts/. Accessed 22 December 2019. Wright A (2018) Alexis Wright’s 2018 Stella Prize Acceptance Speech. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/2018/04/alexis-wright-acceptance-speech/. Accessed 15 July 2018.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Recognition, reputation and accolades are rarely cited as the inspiration for creative or literary expression. Despite this, prizes and critical discourse are the mechanisms by which we celebrate creative or literary expression, and in many ways are the mechanisms by which this expression is cemented in our collective cultural memory. The dearth of women authors and authors of colour within the celebratory halls of power is not unique to the Anglophone publishing field, such systemic underrepresentation is commonplace in the fields of music and film, among others. The most public example of this under-representation comes to light annually with the announcement of nominations for major film prizes such as the Academy Awards, the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes. The announcement of the 2020 Academy Award nominations delivered its routine ire as no women were nominated for the directing category, and only one person of colour was nominated in the acting categories, Cynthia Erivo for Harriet. Film critic Dana Stevens responded to the lack of women directors among the nominees, noting, ‘the studious exclusion of anyone female from the award that above all confers authorship and authority…starts to look like nothing else but rank condescending sexism’ (Stevens 2020: n.p.). Here Stevens picks up on a major theme that runs through this book: the fight for recognition and celebration of the authority of women authors.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_7

213

214

A. DANE

In an op-ed for Vanity Fair discussing her film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, director Greta Gerwig wrote of the central thesis of her adaptation; that what authors write about is what becomes important, that fiction confers as well as reflects what matters (Gerwig 2020: n.p.). Gerwig observes that: I still think we very much have a hierarchy of stories. I think that the top of the hierarchy is male violence—man on man, man on woman, etc. I think if you look at the books and films and stories that we consider to be ‘important,’ that is a common theme, either explicitly or implicitly.

Critical attention and recognition by the judges of major prizes is what established and what continues to maintain the structure of this hierarchy in the field of cinema and in the field of publishing and literature. The effects of the decisions by prize committees, literary editors and festival programmers radiate beyond the field and influence perceptions around the narratives considered important, and the stories that are told. The contemporary Australian literary field is a complex network of agents and institutions, their structure and hierarchy determined by their interactions, which are governed by deep-seated notions of belief. In some ways, the field in 2015 is almost unrecognisable to that of 1965; in just 50 years the Australian publishing industry has experienced major changes to the way that books are produced and consumed. In many cases this change is rapid, and in others it is painstakingly slow. Publishing houses have been established, bought, sold and collapsed. Today’s publishing landscape, characterised by a bifurcation between many small and independent presses and the ‘big five’ publishing conglomerates, bears little resemblance to the industry in 1965, when the majority of publishers were British and American satellites. Bookselling has also evolved into a structure in which independent bookshops, discount department stores and online retailers share the market almost equally. Similarly, the role of women in the Australian publishing industry has changed in the 50 years to 2015. In the early- to mid-1960s there were ‘very few, if any’ women in the field (Thompson 2006). Women now occupy the majority of senior management positions in small, medium and large publishing houses, although they are under-represented when it comes to the company principals in medium and large firms (Couper 2016: 29). So too has the representation of women increased as reviewers

7

CONCLUSION

215

and prize judges, in book review pages, on the festival stage, and on the list of winners for the country’s major literary awards. Although the changes to the representation of women over the period 1965–2015 were rapid to begin with, in a number of cases the pace of change has begun to crawl. Women authors were under-represented among the most powerful in 1965 and continue to be under-represented today. It is going to take more than time to transform the entrenched attitudes and dispositions that have ensured the dominance of the status quo for more than 50 years. The rigid notions of literary excellence that govern the inclusion and exclusion of texts within the Australian classroom canon ensure that the same kinds of texts are prescribed or suggested to students again and again, and efforts to ensure the lists are more inclusive of marginalised voices often result in a significant increase in the number of texts on the lists, a practice that rarely brings about change to the texts actually taught in the classroom (Dolin et al. 2017). Rather than replacing texts that conform to a narrow conception of literary merit, the space occupied by texts written by dead white men and Jane Austen maintain their place and are supplemented by titles representing a more contemporary and diverse outlook. Dolin et al. (2017) research indicates that this is not the way to encourage pedagogical engagement with new texts and authors that might help to establish more contemporary and inclusive master-patterns in students. Such rigid notions around excellence, I argue, flow into the way that literary reputations are built and maintained in the Australian publishing field. Despite continued efforts over the twentieth and early twenty-first century, transforming these systems of thought is proving difficult. Book reviews in major daily newspapers and magazines are often the first place potential readers encounter new works and new authors. This gives them a particular role as the public face of the Australian literary field, especially when it comes to the representation of women and other marginalised groups. While activist research that aimed to address the gender gap in major reviewing publications in the 1980s failed to bring about lasting change, it did highlight the strength of the entrenched structures of power in the field and the ability for the old habits of the papers’ literary editors, their ideas around representation and authority, to creep quickly back in and facilitate the restoration of the status quo where men, once again, dominate reviews. Due to the interrelated, overlapping nature of these agents of consecration, the perceptions around

216

A. DANE

gender, value and prestige that pervade the book reviews also bleed into the programming of literary festivals and judging of literary prizes. The structuring of authors and events within a literary festival program allows us to see the relational structure between gender and power in the literary field. Even though the representation of women in the literary festival program is quite high—often sitting at around 45%—an examination of the various positions and roles women occupy in the festival program makes it clear that women and other marginalised authors are regarded in a different light to their white male counterparts: women rarely represent more than 35% of the keynote speakers in a given decade and are more likely than men to play a moderator or facilitator role one-on-one and in panel discussions. In this way, the literary festival can be viewed as a microcosm of the broader literary field: despite the fact that women are in the majority—as festivalgoers, readers, authors, editors, senior managers in publishing houses, festival organisers and prize administrators—they rarely occupy the spaces attached to the most prestige. Further study is required to understand how literary reputations are built in the Australian field, and how particular groups are afforded different and disproportionate access to the symbolic capital that is essential for building this reputation. This study is concerned with the relationship between gender and literary prestige; prestige that is established through interaction with book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes. But this is not necessarily the full picture. The relationship between race and literary prestige in the Australian literary field is an area that is under-researched and would build on the scholarship presented in this volume. At present, there is no database or comprehensive resource that records the ethnicities of Australian authors, other than the BlackWords database for First Nations authors. Without this resource, it is difficult to explore the ways that race and prestige interact in the literary field, especially with a study of this size. However, taking a small sample of the descriptive demographic data collected from book reviews, writers’ festivals and literary prizes, future researchers could explore these questions in more detail. This research also focuses on agents of consecration that represent the traditional arbiters of taste in the field. However, the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and digital platforms has brought about significant changes in the way that literary reputations are established and maintained. From the baseline established in this research, future researchers

7

CONCLUSION

217

could chart the shifting relationship between gender and traditional agents of consecration, and the new digital agents that have entered the field. Has the dominance of the traditional agents of consecration been tempered by emerging technologies? How have social media platforms influenced the relationship between gender and prestige in the literary field? Finally, further study is required to understand the relationship between authors and readers. What currency does the accumulated symbolic capital of authors have beyond the literary field? What is the extent of the influence of agents of consecration on the reading habits of Australians? How do the gender, race and sexuality of an author influence the perception of their writing beyond the field of cultural production? Understanding how the structure and disposition of the literary field influences the production, reception and consumption of literary works has long been the basis for research in publishing studies. With new research databases such as the AustLit database and the popularisation of quantitative research methods in the discipline, these are just some of the many directions this line of inquiry can take. The research presented in this volume establishes a powerful rationale for a longitudinal and quantitative approach to the study of power and prestige in contemporary book culture. It is only with 50 years of data from the field that we can see the changing way that symbolic capital is distributed by consecratory institutions, and see that recent efforts to address the gender gap in book reviewing, at literary festivals and on literary prize shortlists are on their own inadequate and indicate that a more rigorous reassessment of the way literary tastes and values are developed and perpetuated. This research sheds light on the gender prestige gap in contemporary Australian book publishing and presents new knowledge about the way that agents of consecration work together to confer prestige and establish literary reputations. The comprehensive original data set that represents half a century of book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes allows for the examination of the relationship between gender and prestige in the Australian field. For the book review pages of the country’s major newspapers and cultural magazines, the representation of women authors and women reviewers is complex and, I argue, influenced by social and economic, as well as cultural factors. Despite this complexity, the descriptive demographic data drawn from ABR, The Age and The Australian, indicates that the representation of women has in many cases plateaued in

218

A. DANE

over the last 20–30 years, and that men who review books in this publication are much less likely to review books by women and women are much more likely to review books by both men and women, a factor that, I argue, exacerbates the broader gender reviewing gap and speaks to deepseeded attitudes around gender, legitimacy and authority in the literary field. These attitudes, I have found, are also evident when examining the relationship between gender and literary festival programming. The analysis presented in this book establishes original understandings of the way power and authority are communicated at literary festivals in Australia. While the representation of women in literary festival programs is consistently strong in the sample period, men continue to dominate the most coveted and prestigious events. Moreover, women are much more likely than men to be placed in the supporting roles as panel moderators. Not only does this signal to the perceived power and authority of men in the literary field it also contributes to the perpetuation of this perception. If men are more likely to be seen in these positions of authority, it follows that they will continue to be understood more broadly as authorities. This is, perhaps, one of the strongest arguments for the importance of representation and visibility within consecratory institutions of traditionally marginalised groups. Literary prizes gender gap has, for some time, garnered significant attention in both Australia and abroad. The analysis presented in this volume builds upon this scholarly attention by examining the way that the relationship between gender and prizes changes across genre and sectors, as well as gender breakdown of prize judging panels and the pattern of their decisions. The conclusions I reach from this analysis is that perhaps the approach that has traditionally been seen as the most egalitarian—that is, refusing to consider the gender of the author as a factor in the judging process—is a short-sighted one, and one that helps to support the status quo.

References Couper S (2016) Bookish Girls: Gender and Leadership in Australian Trade Publishing. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 27–47. Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (2017) Conditional Assent: Literary Value and the Value of English as a Subject. In: Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (eds)

7

CONCLUSION

219

Required Reading: Literature in Australian Schools Since 1945. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 3–19. Gerwig G (2020) Greta Gerwig on the Lives of Little Women—And Why ‘Male Violence’ Isn’t All That Matters. Vanity Fair, 11 January. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/01/greta-gerwig-lit tle-women-script. Accessed 15 January 2020. Stevens D (2020) Does the Academy Think Little Women Directed Itself? Slate, 13 January. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/2020-oscarnominations-snub-greta-gerwig-little-women-male-directors.html. Accessed 15 January 2020. Thompson F (2006) Sixties Larrikins. In: Munro C and Sheahan-Bright R (eds) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 31–50.

References

ABR (2016) Media Kit. Available at: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/ advertise. Accessed 14 July 2018. Adelaide Festival (2018) Demographics. Available at: https://www.adelaidefest ival.com.au/demographics. Accessed 15 July 2018. Adkins L (2004) Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and After. Sociological Review 52(2): 1–18. Allan S and Driscoll B (2013) Making the List: The Value of Prizes for Women Writers and the Construction of Educational Reading Lists. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 127, 140. Allington P (2011) What Is Australia, Anyway? The Glorious Limitations of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Australian Book Review 332: 23–34. Allington P (2015) Media Makers: Critical Matters, Popular Versus Highbrow. Melbourne Writers Festival Panel Discussion, 21 August. Allington D (2016) Power to the Reader or Degradation of Literary Taste? Professional Critics and Amazon Customers as Reviewers of The Inheritance of Loss. Language and Literature 25(3): 254–278. AustLit (2017a) Data Extracted from Advanced Search of Database, Literary Titles Published 1965–2015. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. AustLit (2017b) About AustLit. Available at: https://www-austlit-edu-au.ezp. lib.unimelb.edu.au/about. Accessed 13 November 2018. Barker C and Jane E A (2016) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0

221

222

REFERENCES

Bird D (1997) Women Writers, Gendered Readings, Literary Politic. Southerly 57(3): 115–124. Birmingham J (2010) How to Pull a Crowd. Australian Author, April: 12–15. BlackWords (2017) AustLit Database. BlackWords: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers. Available at: www.austlit.edu.au. Accessed 15 September 2017. Bode K (2008) Graphically Gendered: A Quantitative Study of the Relationships Between Australian Novels and Gender from the 1830s to the 1930s. Australian Feminist Studies 23(58): 435–450. Bode K (2010) Publishing and Australian Literature: Crisis, Decline or Transformation? Cultural Studies Review 16(2): 24–48. Bode K (2012) Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London: Anthem Press. Bode K and Dixon R (2009) Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age? In: Bode K and Dixon R (eds) Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 1–31. Bode K and Murphy T (2014) Methods and Canons: An Interdisciplinary Excursion. In: Longley Artur P and Bode K (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu P (1967) Systems of Education and Systems of Thought. International Social Science Journal 19(3): 338–358. Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu P (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu P (1998) On Male Domination. Le Monde Diplomatique, October. Available at: https://mondediplo.com/1998/10/10bourdieu. Accessed 7 July 2018. Bourdieu P (2004) Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu P and Passeron J (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Boyd Rioux (2016) Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. New York: W. W. Norton. Burns D and Walker M (2005) Feminist Methodologies. In: Somekeh B and Lewin C (eds) Research Methods in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 66–74. Carter D (1997) Literary Canons and Literary Institutions. Southerly 57(3): 16– 37.

REFERENCES

223

Carter D (2007) Boom, Bust or Business as Usual? Literary Fiction Publishing. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 231–254. Carter D (2009) The State and Future of the Discipline. Structures, Networks, Institutions: The New Empiricism, Book History and Literary History. In: Bode K and Dixon R (eds) Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 31–53. Carter D (2016) The Literary Field and Contemporary Trade-Book Publishing in Australia: Literary and Genre Fiction. Media International Australia 158(1): 48–57. Clark A (1998) Convict Tale Takes Top Book Award. The Age, 5 June. Colmer J (1971) Book Reviewing in Australian Newspapers. Meanjin Quarterly, September: 344–352. Cooter M et al. (1987) Women in Publishing. Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Coronel T (2012) Book Sales Have Fallen Off a Cliff: What Next for the Australian Publishing Industry? Island 128: 18–26. Cosar L (1997) A Long Shot Makes the Miles. The Age, 6 June. Couper S (2016) Bookish Girls: Gender and Leadership in Australian Trade Publishing. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 27–47. Cunningham S (2011) A Prize of One’s Own: Flares, Cock-Forests and Dreams of a Common Language. Kill Your Darlings: 6. Available at: https://killyourdarlings.com.au/article/a-prize-of-ones-own-flarescock-forests-and-dreams-of-a-common-language. Accessed 3 July 2018. Curtain J (1993) Book Publishing. In: Cunningham S and Turner G (eds) The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, pp. 102–119. Davies L (2017) Interview, 3 April. Davis M (2006) The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing. Heat 12: 91–108. Davis M (2007) The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 116–132. Davis M (2016) The Changing Literary Ecology. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 47–67. Davis M (2018) Who Needs Cultural Gatekeepers Anyway? Australian Literary Culture and Its Post-Digital Anxieties. Sydney Review of Books, 17 July. Available at: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/who-needs-cultural-gatekeepersanyway/. Accessed 17 July 2018.

224

REFERENCES

Demoor M et al. (2008) ‘And the Winner Is?’ Researching the Relationship Between Gender and Literary Awards in Flanders, 1981–2000. Journal of Gender Studies 17(1): 27–39. Dempster L (2018) Interview, 8 June. De Nooy W (1988) Gentlemen of the Jury…: The Features of Experts Awarding Literary Prizes. Poetics 17: 531–545. Diversity Arts Australia (2019) Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity Within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors. Parramatta: University of Western Sydney. Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (2017) Conditional Assent: Literary Value and the Value of English as a Subject. In: Dolin T, Jones J and Dowsett P (eds) Required Reading: Literature in Australian Schools Since 1945. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 3–19. Down J (2018) Interview, 29 March. Driscoll B (2009) The Politics of Prizes. Meanjin 68: 71–78. Driscoll B (2014) The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. During S (2005) Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. London, New York: Routledge. English J (2002) Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards and the Rules of Art. New Literary History 33(1): 109–135. English J (2009) The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Enright A (2017) Diary. London Review of Books 39(18): 33–35. Ensor J (2009) ‘Still Waters Run Deep’: Empirical Methods and the Migration Patterns of Regional Publishers’ Authors and Titles Within Australian Literature. Antipodes, December: 197–209. Ezell M J M (1996) Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Fitzpatrick S (2013) Quite a Wake Up Call for Miles Franklin Winner. The Australian, 20 June. Flanagan R (2007) Colonies of the Mind, Republics of Dreams: Australian Publishing Past and Future. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 132–115. Flint N (2014) Stella Prize Sends a Message That Women Are Incapable of Competing Intellectually with Men. The Advertiser, 29 April. Available at: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/stella-prize-sends-a-mes sage-that-women-are-incapable-of-competing-intellectually-with-men-nicolleflint/news-story/4e933e5d9923ca9ba623458c8fb8ff6e. Accessed 15 July 2018.

REFERENCES

225

Flood A (2015) Books About Women Less Likely to Win Prizes, Study Finds. The Guardian, 1 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2015/jun/01/books-about-women-less-likely-to-win-prizes-study-finds. Accessed 15 July 2018. Foster L (2016) Spreading the Word: Feminist Print Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Women’s History Review 25(5): 812–831. Fowler B (2003) Reading Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination: Notes Towards an Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Culture and Class. Cultural Studies 17(3–4): 468–494. Free D (2009) What’s Wrong With Australian Fiction: A Sceptical Look at the Miles Franklin Shortlist. Quadrant, December: 22–29. Fuller D and Rehberg Sedo D (2013) Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London, New York: Routledge. Fuller D and Rehberg Sedo D (2014) Reading Beyond the Book. Philadelphia: Pen State University Press. Gerwig G (2020) Greta Gerwig on the Lives of Little Women—And Why ‘Male Violence’ Isn’t All That Matters. Vanity Fair, 11 January. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/01/greta-gerwig-lit tle-women-script. Accessed 15 January 2020. Giuffre G (1987) To Be Australian, a Woman and a Writer. London: University of London. Goldsworthy K (2013) Everyone’s a Critic. Australian Book Review, May: 20–30. Greene J C et al. (2005) Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Social Inquiry. In: Someck B and Lewin C (eds) Research Methods in the Social Sciences. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, pp. 274–293. Griffith N (2015) Books About Women Don’t Win Big Awards: Some Data. Nicola Griffith. Available at: https://nicolagriffith.com/2015/05/26/ books-about-women-tend-not-to-win-awards/. Accessed 15 January 2020. Guillroy J (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey M and Lamond J (2016) Taking the Measure of Gender Disparity in Australian Book Reviewing as a Field, 1985 and 2013. Australian Humanities Review 60: 84–107. Hayden D (2018) Men Still Too Often See Their Writing as the Canon: An Homage to the Women Who Have Influenced My Writing. LitHub, 25 May. Available at: https://lithub.com/david-hayden-men-still-too-often-see-theirwriting-as-the-canon/. Accessed 14 July 2018. Heiss A (2003) Dhuuluu-Yala = To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Heiss A (2018) Interview, 23 May. Heller and Stevens (2015) Does an Award Like the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction Help or Hurt the Cause of Women Writers? New York Times, 26 May.

226

REFERENCES

Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/books/review/doesan-award-like-the-baileys-womens-prize-for-fiction-help-or-hurt-the-cause-ofwomen-writers.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Hennessey A (2000) Online Bookselling. Publishing Research Quarterly 16(2): 34–51. Henshaw M (2016) Interview, 10 October. Heseltine H (2001) The Most Glittering Prize: The Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1957 –1998. Canberra: Australian Defence Force Academy. Hesmondhalgh D (2006) Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production. Media, Culture and Society 28(2): 211–231. Heyward M (2017) Interview, 13 February. Horn H (2015) France: Where Men Have a Monopoly on Good Writing. The Atlantic, 4 November. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/intern ational/archive/2015/11/prix-goncourt-france-women/414241/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Howlie M (2017) Interview, 16 May. Johanson K and Freeman R (2012) The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the contemporary Audience. Continuum 26(2): 303–314. Kirpalani A (2017) Interview, 29 March. Kaye L and Johanson K (2007) Publishing and Bookselling. In: Carter D and Galligan A (eds) Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 68–80. Knox M (2009) Reviewing the Review. The Book Review and the Book Review Pages: What Place Today and Tomorrow. Australian Author, August: 9–12. Kon-Yu N (2016) A Testicular Hit-List of Literary Big Cats’. Overland 223: 14–20. Krais B (2000) Gender Relationships in Bourdieu’s Society. Sub-Stance 93: 53– 67. Krais B (2006) Gender, Sociological Theory and Bourdieu’s Sociology of Practice. Theory, Culture & Society 23(6): 119–134. Kretzchmar M (2017) Interview, 11 May. Kristensen N N and From U (2015) Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in a Changing Media Landscape. Journalism Practice 9(6): 760–772. Lamond J (2011) Stella Versus Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia. Meanjin 70(3): 32–39. Lawson S (2005) Critical Absences. Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing, No. 4. Lewinsky A (2016) Interview, 22 November. Lever S (1997) Government Patronage and Literary Reputations. Southerly 57(3): 104–114. Lizé W (2016) Cultural Consecration and Legitimation: Modes, Agents and Processes. Poetics 59: 1–4.

REFERENCES

227

Lurie C (2004) Festivals Inc. Australian Author 36(2): 8–12. Marsden S and Smith W (2019) And the Winner Is…? Prizes and Awards in Arts and Culture. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Marsden S and Squires C (2019) The First Rule of Judging Club…: Inside the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Masson P (2018) Interview, 5 April. McCall L (1992) Does Gender Fit? Bourdieu, Feminism, and Conceptions of Social Order. Theory and Society 21: 837–867. McDonald S (2016) On Not ‘Turning Back the Car’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the SACE English Studies’ List of Prescribed Texts. English in Australia 51(1): 46–52. McDowell L (2012) Woman Book Reviewer Chooses to Review Books by Women, Shocker. Lesley McDowell, Author and Critic. Available at: http://lesleymcdowellwriter.blogspot.com/2012/07/woman-bookreviewer-chooses-books-by.html. Accessed 15 January 2020. McLaren J (1981) Book Reviewing in Newspapers, 1948–1978. In: Bennett B (ed) Cross Currents: Magazines and Newspapers in Australian Literature. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, pp. 240–255. McPhee H (2001) Other People’s Words: The Rise and Fall of an Accidental Publisher. London: Picador. Meehan M (2005) The World Made Flesh: Festival, Carnality and Literary Consumption. Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing, No. 4. Miles Franklin Literary Award (2017) Guidelines. Available at: https://www. perpetual.com.au/~/media/perpetual/pdf/resources/mfla/2018_miles_fran klin_guidelines_final.ashx?la=en. Accessed 15 July 2018. Moi T (1991) Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture. New Literary History 22(4): 1017–1049. Moore J (2017) Interview, 5 May. Mullins K (2016) Women for Media Report: An Analysis of the Gender Balance of Sources and Experts Across Australian Metropolitan Print Media. Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. Available at: http://www.wlia.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2016/12/Women-for-Media-Report-2016-FINAL.pdf. Accessed 4 July 2018. Munro C and Sheahan-Bright R (2006) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946–2005. University of Queensland Press. Murray S (2004) Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics. London, Stirling, and Virginia: Pluto Press. Murray S (2007) Publishing Studies: Critically Mapping Research in Search of a Discipline. Publishing Research Quarterly 22(4): 3–25.

228

REFERENCES

Murray S (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge. Nakamura L (2013) ‘Words With Friends’: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads. PMLA 128(1): 238–243. Nancarrow D (2012) Writer’s Dream Run Culminates in Miles. The Age, 21 June. Nelson C, Treichler P A, and Grossberg L (1992) Cultural Studies: An Introduction. In: Grossberg L, Nelson C and Treichler P A (eds) Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1–23. Neuwirth C (2019) Speculative Archiving of a Potential Future Literary Award: Embedded Publishing Studies Research. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 4(2): 1–10. Nixon S and du Gay P (2002) Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries? Cultural Studies 16(4): 495–500. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2013) Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Structural Reform in the Newspaper Industry on the Marketing of Books. In: Stinson E (ed) By the Book: Contemporary Publishing in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 29–39. Nolan S and Ricketson M (2019) The Shrinking of Fairfax Media’s Books Pages: A Microstudy of Digital Disruption. Australian Journalism Review 41 (1): 17–35. Norris S (2006) The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective. Journal for Cultural Research 10(2): 139–158. NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (2016) Entry Guidelines. Available at: https:// www.sl.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/pla_2016_guidelines.pdf. Accessed 25 June 2020. NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (2017) Guidelines. Available at: https://www.sl. nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/pla_2018_guidelines_tagged.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2018. NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (2018) About the Awards. Available at: http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library-awards/about-awards. Accessed 15 July 2018. O’Brien K (2016) 10 Facts about the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Bookseller, 6 June. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/insight/10facts-about-baileys-womens-prize-fiction-331221. Accessed 15 July 2018. O’Hara D (2000) Capitalism and Culture: Bourdieu’s Field Theory. American Studies 45(1): 43–53. Ommundsen W (2000) The Circus Is in Town: Literary Festivals and the Mapping of Cultural Heritage. In: de Groen F and Stewart K (eds) Australian Writing in the City. Sydney: The Association for the Study of Australian Literature, pp. 173–179.

REFERENCES

229

Ommundsen W (2009) Literary Festivals and Cultural Consumption. Australian Literary Studies 24(1): 19–34. Palattella J (2010) The Death and Life of the Book Review. The Nation 21: 25–31. Pouly M P (2016) Playing Both Sides of the Field: The Anatomy of a ‘Quality’ Bestseller. Politics 59: 20–34. Ray Murray P and Squires C (2013) The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit. Book 2.0 3(1): 3–24. Reserve Bank of Australia (2018) Inflation Calculator. Available at: https://www. rba.gov.au/calculator/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Romei S (2011) Second Dane for Miles Franklin Winner. The Australian, 23 June. Romei S (2014) Sonya Hartnett on Children, Golden Boys, and The Stella Prize—And Animals. The Australian, 16 August. Romei S (2015) Laguna’s Misfits Catches Eye of Miles Franklin Panel. The Australian, 24 June. Romei S (2016) Interview, 9 October. Rose P (2018) Interview, 27 March. Roy Morgan (2018) Australian Newspaper Readership. Available at: http:// www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/newspaper-readership. Accessed 14 July 2018. Russ J (1983) How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sapiro G (2016) The Metamorphosis of the Modes of Consecration in the Literary Field: Academies, Literary Prizes, Festivals. Poetics 59: 5–19. Schiffrin A (2000) The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso. Shapcott T (1988) The Literature Board: A Brief History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Sheridan S (2011) Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Smith Maguire J and Matthews J (2010) Cultural Intermediaries and the Media. Sociology Compass 4(7): 405–416. Smith Maguire J and Matthews J (2012) Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now? An Introduction to Cultural Intermediaries in Context. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5): 551–562. Spender D (1989) Is it the Writing or the Sex? Or, Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Squires C (2004) A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe. Javnost— The Public 11(4): 37–47. Squires C (2007) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

230

REFERENCES

Squires C (2013) Literary Prizes and Awards. In: Harper G (ed) A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 291–303. Squires C (2017) Publishing’s Diversity Deficit. CAMEo Cuts 2. Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies. UK: University of Leicester. Squires C (2020) The Review and the Reviewer. In: Baverstock A and Bradford R (eds.) Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books. Abingdon: Routledge. Starke R (1998) Writers, Readers and Rebels: Upfront and Backstage at Australia’s Top Literary Festival. Kent Town: Wakefield Press. Starke R (2006) Case-Study: Festival Big Top. In: Munro C and Sheehan-Bright R (eds) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 156–159. Steger J (2000) Two Share Miles Franklin. The Age, 9 June. Steger J (2002) Big-Guns Shortlisted for Literary Prize. The Age, 19 April. Steger J (2004) Literary Lions in Line-Up for Australia’s Weightiest Book Prize. The Age, 30 June. Steger J (2009) Melbourne Novelist Tsiolkas on Miles Franklin Shortlist. The Age, April 16. Available at: https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/ books/melbourne-novelist-tsiolkas-on-miles-franklin-shortlist-20090416-ge7 sx8.html. Accessed 25 June 2020. Stella Prize (2018a) The Count. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/thecount/. Accessed 6 July 2018. Stella Prize (2018b) About Us. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/ about/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Stella Schools (2020) About Stella Schools. Available at: https://thestellaprize. com.au/schools/. Accessed 26 June 2020. Stevenson D (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Stevens I (2004) A Short History of the Literature Board, 1986–2000. Surry Hills: Australia Council. Stevens D (2020) Does the Academy Think Little Women Directed Itself? Slate, 13 January. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/2020-oscarnominations-snub-greta-gerwig-little-women-male-directors.html. Accessed 15 January 2020. Stewart C (2013) The Rise and Rise of Writers’ Festivals. In: Harper G (ed) A Companion to Creative Writing. Hoboken: Wiley, pp. 263–277. Stewart E (2018) Interview, 24 July. Stinson E (2012) Critical Danger: Book Reviewing, Prizes and Australia’s Consensus-Culture. Wheeler Centre Daily, 28 August. Available at: https:// www.wheelercentre.com/notes/b6d4b3141c8f. Accessed 6 July 2018. Stinson E (2016a) Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption. Australian Humanities Review 59: 23–43.

REFERENCES

231

Stinson E (2016b) Small Publishers and the Miles Franklin Award. In: Mannion A and Stinson E (eds) The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 137–149. Street J (2005) Luck, Power, Corruption, Democracy? Judging Arts Prizes. Cultural Politics 1(2): 215–232. Sullivan V (2017) Interview, 29 March. Summers A (1975) Damned Whores and God’s Police. Melbourne: Penguin. The Canberra Times (1975) Award. The Canberra Times, 23 April: 7. The Telegraph (2018) 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. The Telegraph, 24 June. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/100greatest-novels-time/. Accessed 3 July 2018. The Wheeler Centre (2017) Conditions and Guidelines. Available at: https:// www.wheelercentre.com/projects/victorian-premier-s-literary-awards-2016/ conditions-and-guidelines. Accessed 15 July 2018. The Wheeler Centre (2018) About the Awards. Available at: https://www.whe elercentre.com/projects/victorian-premier-s-literary-awards-2018/about-theawards. Accessed 15 July 2018. Thompson F (2006) Sixties Larrikins. In: Munro C and Sheahan-Bright R (eds) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 31–50. Thompson J (2012) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the TwentyFirst Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson J B (2010) Merchants of Culture. London: Polity. Throsby D et al. (2017) Australian Book Readers: Survey Methods and Results. Macquarie Economics Research Papers. Available at: http://www.australia council.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/australian-book-readers-24-05-592 762e0c3ade.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2018. Travis T (2008) The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications. Book History 11(1): 275–300. Tuffield A (2018) What Difference Can a Book Prize for Women Make? Lots, Actually. The Age, 11 April. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/entert ainment/books/what-difference-can-a-book-prize-for-woman-make-lots-act ually-20180411-p4z90l.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Van Rees C J (1983) How a Literary Work Becomes a Masterpiece: On the Threefold Selection Practiced by Literary Criticism. Poetics 12: 397–417. Verboord M (2003) Classification of Authors by Literary Prestige. Poetics 23: 259–281. Verboord M (2009) The Legitimacy of Book Critics in the Age of the Internet and Omnivorousness: Expert Critics, Internet Critics and Peer Critics in Flanders and the Netherlands. European Sociological Review 26(6): 623–637. Verdaasdonk H (1983) Social and Economic Factors in the Attribution of Literary Quality. Poetics 12: 383–395.

232

REFERENCES

VIDA Women in the Literary Arts (2010) VIDA Historical Count. Available at: https://www.vidaweb.org/vida-count/best-of-2009/. Accessed 15 January 2020. VIDA Women in the Literary Arts (2019) VIDA Count Archives. Available at: https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/previous-counts/. Accessed 22 December 2019. Wacquant L (2016) A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus. The Sociological Review 64: 64–72. Weber M (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood C (2018) Interview, 20 April. Wright A (2018) Alexis Wright’s 2018 Stella Prize Acceptance Speech. Available at: http://thestellaprize.com.au/2018/04/alexis-wright-acceptance-speech/. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wright D (2005) Mediating Production and Consumption: Cultural Capital and Cultural Workers. The British Journal of Sociology 56(1): 105–121. Wyndham S (2004) Judges Storm Out of Miles Franklin Literary Prize. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/ news/Books/Judges-storm-out-of-Miles-Franklin-prize/2004/12/21/110 3391774639.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wyndham S (2016) The Hidden Costs That Threaten Australian Literary Awards. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December. Available at: https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-hidden-costs-that-threaten-australianliterary-awards-20161202-gt32wc.html. Accessed 15 July 2018. Wyndham S (2017) The Last Literary Editor. Meanjin, Summer. Available at: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-literary-editor/. Accessed 14 July 2018. Wyndham S (2018) Interview, 26 February. Yiannakis J (2014) Tallying a Possible Literary Canon in Upper School English Literature as Evidenced in Various Australian States, 1945–2005. Issues in Education Research 24(1): 98–113. Zangen B (2003) Women as Readers, Writers and Judges: Controversy About the Orange Prize for Fiction. Women’s Studies 32: 281–299. Zwar J (2012) What Were We Buying? Non-Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction Sales Patterns in Australia in the 2000s. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: JASAL 12(23): 1–27.

Index

A Access, 65, 66, 70 Achebe, Chinua, 181 Ackroyd, Peter, 67 Adamson, Robert, 156, 192, 193 Adelaide Writers Week, 29, 121, 199 The Age, 41–84 Agent of consecration, 22, 70, 126, 180, 182, 184–187, 193, 196 Allende, Isabel, 99, 181 American Book Awards, 157 Amis, Kingsley, 67, 134 Anderson, Jessica, 155 Astley, Thea, 29, 138, 139, 148, 154, 155, 172, 183, 192 Atkinson, Alan, 155 Atwood, Margaret, 67, 68, 148, 181, 182, 189, 190 Audience, 16, 31, 89, 91–94, 97, 99, 102, 105, 116, 121, 194, 200 Austlit, 34, 51, 143 Australia Council, 29 The Australian, 41–84

Australian Book Review (ABR), 6, 24, 26, 43–84 Authority, 6, 7, 20, 24, 26, 27, 41, 46, 65, 76, 78, 83, 91, 94, 102, 109, 111, 116, 121, 125, 136, 147, 170, 171, 198, 213, 215, 218

B Bail, Murray, 155, 192 Baldwin, James, 95, 181 Ballou, Emily, 77, 78 Barnes, Julian, 194 Beer, Maggie, 92 Bestsellers/sales, 76–78, 126, 187, 193–195, 200 Beveridge, Judith, 66, 156 Birch, Tony, 163, 167, 183 Bird, Carmel, 97, 190 Birmingham, John, 92–94 Blainey, Geoffrey, 67, 99, 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Dane, Gender and Prestige in Literature, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0

233

234

INDEX

Bode, Katherine, 4–5, 12, 18, 20, 24, 32, 33, 45, 48, 75, 115, 120, 137, 205 Boochani, Behrouz, 131 Booker Prize, 21, 77, 124, 126, 132, 134, 140, 148, 152, 190, 200, 207 Book reviewing practice, 67, 72, 84, 94, 149, 165 Book reviews, 25, 26, 41–84 Boston Review, 58 Boyd, Martin, 67 Brett, Lily, 97, 116, 154, 156, 183, 195 Brontë, Charlotte, 134, 135 Brookner, Anita, 67, 68, 134 Brooks, Geraldine, 77, 78, 169, 195 Brown, Bob, 92 Burgess, Anthony, 67, 181 Byatt, A.S., 21, 134

C The Canberra Times , 51, 52 Carey, Peter, 68, 69, 99, 115, 155, 168, 183, 188, 192, 195, 199, 200 Castro, Brian, 155, 192 Cathcart, Michael, 191 Catton, Eleanor, 99, 194 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 23 Chekhov, Anton, 23, 208 Classroom canon, 21–22, 23, 215 Clinton, Hilary, 78 Cobby Eckermann, Ali, 84, 148 Coetzee, J.M., 69, 183, 192, 199, 200 Coleman, Peter, 78 Condon, Matthew, 67 Conrad, Joseph, 23 Cooter, Margaret, 6, 26, 44–48, 51, 79, 80, 84, 173, 208

Copysharing/review syndication, 51–53, 55, 82 Corris, Peter, 67, 68, 181, 189, 190 Costa Book Awards, 152 Costello, Peter, 78 Courtenay, Bryce, 95 Cultural capital, 127, 132 Cultural intermediaries, 18, 30–32, 93, 127, 142, 168, 171, 178, 179, 183 Cultural studies, 15 Culture versus commerce, 14, 17, 89, 91 Cunningham, Sophie, 5, 132, 133, 139, 170, 191 Cunxin, Li, 78 D Davies, Luke, 78 Dead authors, 180 De Bernieres, Louis, 104 de Kretser, Michelle, 116, 155, 183, 194, 195, 199–201 Demidenko, Helen, 140 Dempster, Lisa, 97, 101, 103–105, 107 Dessaix, Robert, 99 Disher, Garry, 67, 68 Down, Jennifer, 129, 147, 201 Drewe, Robert, 155, 195 Driscoll, Beth, 7, 14–18, 21, 27, 28, 31, 89, 90, 140, 187, 205 Durack, Mary, 96 Dutton, Geoffrey, 67, 189 E Economic capital, 7, 27, 31, 93, 116, 117, 120, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 135, 144, 169, 194, 195, 201 Eltahawy, Mona, 103

INDEX

English, James, 7, 15, 26, 124–127, 131, 137, 171, 186 Enright, Anne, 20, 75 Euripides, 23 Evaristo, Bernardine, 148 F Feminist literary history, 11, 12 Fesl, Eve, 168 Festival programming practice, 89–121 First Nations authors, 2, 14, 33, 51, 96, 102, 115, 116, 136, 142, 148, 167, 172, 182, 202, 203, 209 Fitzgerald, Ross, 189 FitzSimons, Peter, 77, 78 Flanagan, Richard, 24, 68, 69, 78, 155, 183, 195 Flint, Nicole, 133 Flood, Tom, 124, 155 Foley, Martin, 131–133 Frame, Janet, 67, 68 Franklin, Stella Miles, 130, 132, 138, 140 Franzen, Jonathan, 77, 78 Fraser, Morag, 4, 191 French, Marylin, 45, 47, 58, 79, 80, 206, 208 Friedan, Betty, 206 Funder, Anna, 77, 195, 199–201 G Garner, Helen, 49, 68–70, 77, 78, 155, 183, 189, 190, 192, 195, 199–201 Gerwig, Greta, 212 Gillard, Julia, 78 Giramondo Publishing, 153 Goldsworthy, Kerryn, 50, 163 Grant, Jamie, 78

235

Grayling, A.C., 67, 68 Greenwood, Kerry, 67, 68, 189, 190 Greer, Germaine, 101, 206 Grenville, Kate, 69, 96, 99, 133, 155, 195 Griffiths, Tom, 155

H Habitus, 18–21, 28–29, 43, 47, 53, 58, 59, 83, 120, 171, 172, 203, 208 Haigh, Gideon, 67 Halligan, Marion, 67 Hall, Rodney, 67–70, 99, 188, 189 Handel Richardson, Henry, 181 Hanrahan, Barbara, 67 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 95 Harrower, Elizabeth, 182 Hartnett, Sonya, 21, 133, 192, 199–201 Harvey, Melinda, 6, 26, 48, 50, 51, 70 Hayden, David, 76 Hazzard, Shirley, 95 Heiss, Anita, 99, 115, 116, 194 Henshaw, Mark, 69, 201 Heseltine, Henry, 130, 138–141, 143 Hierarchy, Literary, 15, 20, 27, 41, 91, 92, 124, 128, 136, 154, 163, 182–184, 213–215 Hile, Fiona, 186 Hill, Barry, 154, 155, 191 Hirsi Ali, Ayyan, 78 Hooper, Chloe, 155, 183, 195

I Ishiguro, Kazuo, 181, 182

J Jach, Antoni, 96

236

INDEX

Jacobson, Howard, 78 James, Clive, 67 Jinks, Catherine, 67, 68 Johnson, Boris, 104 Johnston, George, 29, 115 Jolley, Elizabeth, 67, 68, 95, 155, 183 Jones, Emma, 78 Jones, Gail, 192, 193, 208 Jones, Lloyd, 77, 78 Judith Wright Prize for Poetry, 77 K Keesing, Nancy, 96 Keneally, Thomas, 29, 67, 68 Kent, Hannah, 77, 78, 116, 183, 195 Kinsella, John, 67 Kirpalani, Amita, 163, 164 Koch, Christopher, 95, 155 Kon-Yu, Natalie, 2, 135, 136, 164 Koval, Ramona, 191 Kretzschmar, Mandy, 163 L Lamond, Julieanne, 4, 6, 19, 26, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 70, 124, 132, 139 Langford Ginibi, Ruby, 97 LA Times Book Prize, 157 Legitimacy, 1, 3, 4, 7, 12, 20, 23, 24, 42–44, 76, 82, 84, 91, 94, 116, 124–126, 128, 138, 140, 171, 172, 177, 180, 183, 198, 205 Lewinsky, Alice, 49, 80, 81, 95, 104, 132, 163, 204 Lindsay, Joan, 181 Literary canon, 1, 12, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 59, 123, 126, 183 Literary critics, 23–25, 31, 75, 124, 136, 137, 204 Literary editors, 6, 28, 42–84, 149, 177, 187, 189, 204

Literary festivals, 6, 12, 18, 25–31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 55, 89–121, 123, 149, 154, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190–194, 197, 199–201 Literary prizes, 7, 12, 18, 24–29, 33, 43, 44, 55, 77, 90, 103, 106–108, 120, 121, 123–127, 128–173, 179–186, 196–209 London Review of Books , 75 Lucashenko, Melissa, 208 Lurie, Morris, 67 M Mailer, Norman, 67 Malouf, David, 67–70, 154, 155, 182, 183, 188, 190, 192, 195, 199–201 Mantel, Hilary, 194 Marginalisation, 75, 76 Marr, David, 155, 163 Marsden, John, 67 Marsden, Stevie, 2, 24, 126, 136, 148 Matthews, Brian, 156 McCall Smith, Alexander, 67, 69, 181 McDonald, Roger, 155 McDowell, Lesley, 75 McEwan, Ian, 181 McInerny, Monica, 194 McKenna, Mark, 156 Meanjin, 24, 52, 69 Melbourne Writers Festival, 6, 29, 89–121, 180, 181, 184, 185, 188, 190, 199, 202 Methods, 32, 46, 48, 51, 69, 96, 137, 181 Middlebrow, 14, 16, 17, 92, 94, 188 Miles Franklin Literary Award, 1, 4, 27, 29, 68, 103, 128–173, 179, 207 Miller, Alex, 155, 168, 190, 192, 195 Modjeska, Drusilla, 99, 156

INDEX

Moi, Toril, 2, 19 Moorhouse, Frank, 140 Morgan, Sally, 102 Morrissey, Di, 194 Mortimer, John, 67 Murdoch, Iris, 67, 68 Murray, Simone, 15, 92, 93, 117, 206

N The National Book Awards, 157 Neuwirth, Christina, 2 New Republic, 58 Niall, Brenda, 156, 163 Nielsen BookScan, 32, 76, 187 Nine Media, 52 Nobel Prize, 200 Nolan, Sybil, 26, 29, 43, 44, 50, 52, 53, 55, 84 Norris, Sharon, 7, 124–126, 132 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, 29, 138–173, 184, 185

O Oates, Joyce Carol, 67 Ommundsen, Wenche, 89–91, 93, 95, 105 Ondaatje, Michael, 103, 181

P Page, Geoff, 67 Pamuk, Orhan, 181 Patchett, Ann, 181 Pearson, Noel, 99 The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 157 Plunkett, Felicity, 78 Porter, Dorothy, 191, 195 Porter, Hal, 67, 68 Potok, Chaim, 181 Production of belief, 27, 28, 30

237

The Pulitzer Prize, 157 R Ralston, Aron, 78 Reputation, 2, 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 25, 27, 32, 41, 48, 68, 69, 77, 92, 95, 99, 107, 117, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 140, 141, 147, 168, 177, 180, 182, 184, 186–190, 193, 199, 200, 202, 204, 209 Reviewers, 3, 6, 18, 26, 28, 42–84, 91, 107, 151, 163, 177, 178, 180, 187, 194, 196, 199 Robb, Peter, 156 Rodriguez, Judith, 191 Romei, Stephen, 58, 80, 82 Rose, Peter, 49, 58, 81, 82, 138, 163, 172 Roy, Arundhati, 181 Rushdie, Salman, 103, 104, 181 Russ, Joanna, 3, 12 S The Scotsman, 75 Scott, Kim, 95, 138, 148, 155, 172, 183, 199–202 Shakespeare, William, 23, 208 Shapcott, Thomas, 67, 68, 189 Shifting the Balance Report, 118, 119 Simsion, Graeme, 78 Smith, Zadie, 95, 208 Social capital, 15 Social field, 11, 21, 30, 76, 78 Soutphommasane, Tim, 119 Soyinka, Wole, 181 Spender, Dale, 6, 26, 45–48, 59, 79, 80, 84, 208 Squires, Claire, 2, 7, 15, 16, 32, 41, 42, 126, 127, 137 State Library of NSW, 131, 144

238

INDEX

State Library of Victoria, 51, 96, 143, 144 Steger, Jason, 52, 58, 81, 82, 128–130 Stella Count, 5, 6, 48, 50, 80–82, 149, 178, 208, 209 Stella Prize, 1, 21, 46, 50, 80, 81, 132, 133, 135, 136, 149, 151–153, 170, 172, 173, 179, 203, 207–209 Stella Schools, 23 Stella Schools program, 23 Stevens, Dana, 134, 213 Stewart, Emily, 153 Sullivan, Veronica, 46, 170, 172, 203 Summers, Anne, 4, 204–208 Swinn, Louise, 133 Sydney Morning Herald, 44, 48, 50–52, 68, 82 Sydney Writers Festival, 29 Symbolic capital, 2, 15, 16, 18, 19, 30, 42, 44, 48, 53, 55, 59, 62, 66–68, 70, 77, 82, 91–93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 108, 109, 112, 121, 123–128, 130–132, 137, 139–142, 146, 156–158, 163–165, 168–171, 177–180, 182–186 Symbolic violence, 7, 19–21, 30, 124, 125, 128, 133, 135, 137, 138, 145, 158, 160, 179, 186, 198 T Tartt, Donna, 194 Taste/tastemakers, 12, 19, 21, 23–25, 29, 30, 32, 41, 42, 52, 92, 123, 125, 137, 138, 177, 187, 195, 199, 208, 216, 217 Temple, Peter, 155, 195 Theroux, Paul, 67 The Times Literary Supplement , 75 Tofighian, Omid, 131

Tóibín, Colm, 181 Tsiolkas, Christos, 77, 78

U Updike, John, 67, 68, 189

V Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 29, 77, 173 VIDA Count, 5, 6, 48, 58, 59, 80, 157, 206 VIDA Women in Literary Arts, 58, 76, 157 Virago Press, 206 Vonnegut, Kurt, 95

W Walker, Alice, 181, 182, 208 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris, 190 Weber, Millicent, 6, 15, 27, 89, 90, 93, 119 Weldon, Fay, 67 White, Patrick, 29, 155, 181 White women, 13, 14, 34, 136, 148, 172, 194, 199, 206, 207, 209 Williams, Tennessee, 95, 181 Winterson, Jeanette, 99, 103, 181 Winton, Tim, 68, 69, 78, 115, 141, 155, 168, 169, 183, 195, 199–202 Women in Media Report, 26, 65 Women in Print Movement, 206 Women in Publishing Collective, 58 Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, 206 Women’s Prize for Fiction, 133–136, 152, 206 Womersley, Chris, 96 Wood, Charlotte, 107, 117, 121

INDEX

Wright, Alexis, 99, 136, 148, 155, 172, 183, 199–202, 208, 209 Wright, Judith, 77, 83 Wyndham, Susan, 44, 52, 68, 69, 77, 82, 138, 140

Z Zable, Arnold, 191

239