ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu has drawn attention to the tragic consequences for popular writers of the emergence of the modernist literary field. In the 1850s, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and their fellow Parisian writers “invented” a new literature, based on an ethic and aesthetic of transgression, a “realist formalism” (1996a: 107). This avantgarde writing was grounded in a double rupture, a break from the values of the newly rich bourgeoisie on the one hand and from the straightforward morality of social art (Eugène Sue, et al.) on the other (Bourdieu 1996a: 83). Inverting the social order based on market success, the new professional sub-field erected its distinctive system of symbolic credit: the Republic of Letters (1996a: 77, 204). From then on, recognition within modernism derived not from the volume of sales but from the esteem possessed by those with the greatest artistic distinction.
