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Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value
Harvard University Press
December 2008
On Sale: December 15, 2008
432 pages
ISBN: 0674030435
EAN: 9780674030435
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
This is a book about one of the great untold stories of
modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in
literature and the arts. Such prizes and the competitions
they crown are almost as old as the arts themselves, but
their number and power—and their consequences for society
and culture at large—have expanded to an unprecedented
degree in our day. In a wide-ranging overview of this
phenomenon, James F. English documents the dramatic rise of
the awards industry and its complex role within what he
describes as an economy of cultural prestige. Observing that cultural prizes in their modern form
originate at the turn of the twentieth century with the
institutional convergence of art and competitive spectator
sports, English argues that they have in recent decades
undergone an important shift—a more genuine and far-reaching
globalization than what has occurred in the economy of
material goods. Focusing on the cultural prize in its
contemporary form, his book addresses itself broadly to the
economic dimensions of culture, to the rules or logic of
exchange in the market for what has come to be called
"cultural capital." In the wild proliferation of prizes,
English finds a key to transformations in the cultural field
as a whole. And in the specific workings of prizes, their
elaborate mechanics of nomination and election, presentation
and acceptance, sponsorship, publicity, and scandal, he
uncovers evidence of the new arrangements and relationships
that have refigured that field.
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