ABSTRACT
The question of economic concentration in the publishing industry compels widespread attention in large part because people are worried about its cultural effects. Current debates, for instance, tend to center around the question of whether concentration will lead to cultural "massification," or the degradation and standardization of publishing fare. The first part of this article will explore the reasons for such worries and argue that the massification model is inadequate for understanding the present state of publishing and its products. The second part of the article will discuss several conceptual models that attempt to characterize not only the industry's internal peculiarities, but also how it functions as an agency of cultural reproduction that mediates between authors, literary and intellectual establishments, and various kinds of audiences. Finally, the article will grapple with the question of concentration in publishing from a historical perspective, for if cultural degradation has not followed from increased levels of commercialism, it is nonetheless true that various segments of the literary community have been convinced that it would, ever since the literary marketplace emerged during the eighteenth century. This last section will argue that commercialism has, since that time, been linked to an expansion of the reading public. During the eighteenth century, this expansion was part of a revolutionary cultural shift that placed the middle classes, and "their" literature, in a position of undisputed cultural hegemony. Critics of this new literature, and of the novel in particular, rightly perceived that an older cultural elite was being overthrown. Later crises of commercialism in publishing have also, the essay will argue, posed the threat that another social group (represented by ever-widening audiences) might win this position of cultural authority from the middle classes; thus, the recurrent fears of cultural massification. However, until now, though our culture has changed since the late eighteenth century, the middle class has not lost its cultural preeminence. Putting the present crisis of concentration in this context, I will conclude by posing two alternative cultural interpretations of what is happening now: either we are witnessing another period of widened audiences for books (coupled with the emergence of new kinds of media) but firm maintenance of the cultural status quo, or we are at a more significant cultural turning point, when our assumptions about what good literature is, or indeed what literature is, may be deeply challenged.
