Both Mirror and Mechanism: Literature and Its Institutions

The serial fantasy novel, a genre that now commands its own established realm within bookshops and best-seller lists, was born -in Dan Sinykin's telling -from a mass-market editor's innovative response to the demands of conglomerate publishers for more reliable sales (10).The early-1980s move by the National Endowment for the Arts to an anonymous judging process for literature fellowships, argues Alexander Manshel, obliged a literary work's historical setting to stand in for authorial identity, leading "ethnicized history" to function "as a kind of proxy" for the organization's contemporaneous commitment to minoritized writers and thereby moving the historical novel closer to the centre of the canon (72-74).Imbolo Mbue became an author, Anna Muenchrath notes, after finding Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon on an Oprah's Book Club-branded bookshelf, and treated the book club's picks as a "curriculum" as she honed her craft (147).