Literature Festivals

Overview & Synopsis

Literary festivals have become authorities in the literary field, promoting works through the charismatic persona of their author, and operating a transfer of symbolic capital from the most famous ones to the newcomers. Some of these festivals are international, and thus play a role in the making of world authorship and of world literature. Based on a quantitative and qualitative study of thirty-eight international literary festivals, this paper focuses on the way international literary festivals reflect, even as they shape, the structure of the transnational literary field. International festivals tend to mirror the unequal conditions of access to world authorship and the power relations that structure the world market for translations. However, some of them develop strategies to counter these power relations. They are also more politicized, and try to construct a more diverse and inclusive transnational public sphere, where writers act as public intellectuals.