6 - Literary Prizes, Women and the Middlebrow

Summary

Les prix sont des oxymores: à la fois valeur marchande et symbolique’ (Ducas, 2013, 217)

(Prizes are oxymorons: their value is at once commercial and symbolic)

Literary prizes are a prime site of the middlebrow, for they occupy the space that connects literature defined as a high art form with literature as marketable product. Thus many of what are still the major literary awards were founded in the Belle Époque, when the expansion of publishing and literacy laid the ground for the development of middlebrow reading. If the Nobel Prize for outstanding contributions to literature was first awarded in 1901, the concept of an annual prize for a single novel began in France in 1903 with the Prix Goncourt, founded by the last will and testament of the writer and critic Edmond de Goncourt. Each December the Goncourt Academy, composed of ten respected figures from the literary world, meets to select the year's winning novel, which is then hugely publicised through the media and goes on to sell several hundred thousand copies. Since the Goncourt, literary prizes in France have proliferated to the point where one recent study estimates that over two thousand now exist (Ducas, 2013, 5–6), and the model of the annual book award has been adopted across the world, not least in the UK where the Booker Prize (1968, since 2002 the Man-Booker), and the Orange Prize (1996, since 2014 the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction) have become vital mechanisms of the book industry and significant markers and shapers of reading tastes.

Prizes belong in that middle ground where Bourdieu's field of restricted production and field of large-scale production intersect. On the one hand, they subscribe in principle to the ideal of a disinterested reward for pure literary quality, an annual identification and celebration of the very best writing; on the other, prizes are often founded and financed by publishers or other players in the book industry, and the judging process is frequently assumed to be skewed by commercial interests. From one perspective, prizes may be seen as devices that enable the dissemination of the finest writing to a wide public who, without the mediatisation of both author and text, might never consider themselves to be its audience, thus raising literary sensibility across the nation.