This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to “excellence” has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular.
The first is a dataset of the winners and judges of prizes for prose, poetry, or unspecified genre between 1918 and 2020 with a purse of $10,000 and over. The data was collected by hand mainly from institutional websites. Gender and higher education data for individuals was collected from author biographies, interviews, and other materials. Some information about judges not listed on websites was obtained through correspondence with institutions.The dataset includes details about the winners of fifty-two unique prizes awarded by twenty-two institutions. For a subset of thirty-nine prizes, it includes details about judges; not every prize has complete judge data. It does not include prizes awarded specifically for children's literature, nonfiction, drama, or translation.Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young are the principal investigators, did the majority of the data gathering, and are responsible for any errors. They were assisted by Jennifer Chukwu, Clare Lilliston, Jordan Pruett, Esther Vinarov, and Betty He. Richard Jean So provided significant support for this project.
The Index of Major Literary Prizes in the US includes three related datasets. The first is a dataset of the winners and judges of prizes for prose, poetry, or unspecified genre between 1918 and 2020 with a purse of $10,000 and over. The data was collected by hand mainly from institutional websites. Gender and higher education data for individuals was collected from author biographies, interviews, and other materials. Some information about judges not listed on websites was obtained through correspondence with institutions. The dataset includes details about the winners of fifty-two unique prizes awarded by twenty-two institutions. For a subset of thirty-nine prizes, it includes details about judges; not every prize has complete judge data. It does not include prizes awarded specifically for children’s literature, nonfiction, drama, or translation.
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