{"product_id":"selling-the-story-transaction-and-narrative-value-in-balzac-dostoevsky-and-zola","title":"Selling the Story","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEvery writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s \u003ci\u003eThe Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans\u003c\/i\u003e becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. \u003ci\u003eThe Brothers Karamazov\u003c\/i\u003e transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s \u003ci\u003eMoney\u003c\/i\u003e documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCombining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, \u003ci\u003eSelling the Story\u003c\/i\u003e shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54000939073880,"sku":null,"price":50.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780674988439_8b8b5c74-865f-4960-821c-4bf32475abb8.jpg?v=1770266742","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/selling-the-story-transaction-and-narrative-value-in-balzac-dostoevsky-and-zola","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}