Literature in the electric age

This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.