Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Sarah Brouillette, has received an honourable mention from The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present for her book Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford University Press).
“I was totally thrilled to receive the honourable mention,” said Prof. Brouillette. “As a person doing work slightly to the side of mainstream literary studies, I sometimes fear I have no sympathetic readers or that my method is alienating. It was wonderful to be wrong about that, and to feel that I had the support of my close colleagues in an association devoted to the study of contemporary culture.”
This path-breaking work of literary sociology represents the kind of rigorous social analysis and framing that scholars of the contemporary arts have long demanded. It is required reading for all of us who strive to understand not just what the arts mean, but how and in what way their meanings are determined by social forces.
Literature and the Creative Economy concerns topics such as the idea of “immaterial values”, their relation to theories of “the creative class,” and their unappreciated connection to the long history of the individual of the author-creator, who cannot not make new things. Focusing in particular on Britain’s cultural policies under the 1997-2010 “New Labour” governments, Brouillette connects these social developments and ideological tropes through brilliant social analysis and powerful interpretations of contemporary fiction and poetry.