Shakespeare Novelized: Hogarth, Symbolic Capital, and the Literary Market

Abstract

Jeremy Rosen analyzes the Hogarth Shakespeare series, launched in 2015 by Penguin Random House. He shows how today’s large-scale publishers have spurred similar ventures of rewritings, novelizations, and spinoffs of literary classics. Like Penguin Random’s revival of the celebrated Hogarth imprint, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, these publisher-driven intertextual series seek to capitalize on the prestige of illustrious literary brand names, and fuse them with the celebrity of superstar “house” authors, who the publishers commission to execute house-generated works. This trading on prestigious brand names emerges as one of the principal strategies publishers of literary fiction have adopted to find reliable marketplace success, in the era of conglomeration. But Rosen also shows how such strategies sit uneasily with the literary writers commissioned to execute such projects. Rosen detects, within such novels, writers’ continued adherence to a modernist ideal of autonomous production, even as they find themselves writing books contracted by corporate publishers. A tension at the heart of the contemporary literary novel emerges: a vestigial belief in the distinctiveness of the literary and the autonomy of art, vying against an awareness that the novel is ever more deeply embedded in global capital flows.