Clayton Childress: Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel

As Clayton Childress writes in Under the Cover: The Creation, Production and Reception of a Novel, sociologists interested in cultural objects such as books typically study either the way they are produced (through the actions of literary agents, publishers, and booksellers), or how they are received by their readers. Less often, they explore how works are created by their authors. This division of scholarly attention reflects specialization within sociological field theory, which defines fields as groups of people who orient their attention toward each other and toward similar issues, and who tend to interact in certain typical ways. Any cultural object that has an effect in society, however, has clearly traveled from the field of creation through that of production to the field of reception. By examining how this process occurred for a particular novel, Cornelia Nixon’s Jarrettsville, Childress creates a lucid, engaging, and provocative portrait of how novels operate in the...