Literary Awards
Literary awards are honors given to outstanding works of literature, often to recognize excellence in writing, storytelling, and literary achievement. These awards can elevate an author's reputation, increase book sales, and bring attention to important literary works. They also serve to inspire and motivate writers to produce high-quality literature.
3 Key excerpts on "Literary Awards"
eBook - ePubThe Adaptation Industry
The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation
- Simone Murray(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...For such critics, the literary prize is deserving of attention in its own right as a pivotal cultural function within the literary system, influencing in crucial ways the terms on which literature is produced, circulated and consumed. Yet such otherwise groundbreaking literary studies analyses tend to draw a cordon around the literary world, effectively quarantining it from the wider media industries in a manner increasingly difficult to reconcile with corporate publishing’s converged multinational ownership structures and audiences’ medium-eclectic behaviours. For literary prizes do not have a significant impact only within the bibliosphere, but also on the wider cultural landscape through adaptation of literary prize-winning works for other media, notably film and television. It is this extra-literary life of the literary prize-winner with which this chapter is centrally concerned as it attempts to trace a perhaps counterintuitive concept: the life of the novel beyond the book. Literary prizes constitute a crucial but commonly overlooked node of the adaptation network. Chiefly, the literary prize’s role is to catalyse adaptation, by drawing attention to a particular text (or, increasingly, to a shortlist of highlighted texts), by broadening interest in the title beyond the reviews pages of the literary community, typically increasing sales and public recognition of the winning volume in the process and, through a combination of all of these factors, markedly increasing the likelihood of the title’s adaptation into other media formats. The previous chapter examined the creation of a number of awards designed specifically to facilitate adaptation of certain properties, particularly the various prizes instituted by adaptation rights marketplaces such as the Cinema and Literature International Forum (CLIF) in Monaco and the annual Frankfurt Book Fair...
- Sam Duncan(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
...The fifth and final way that literature can be classified concerns personal or societal value judgements: literariness is an assessment of artistic or cultural worth. In this view, all novels are fiction, but only some are important or valued enough to be considered ‘literary’. These five categories of definition each echo – if somewhat quietly – whenever the word ‘literature’ appears. Yet, like the novel, the term ‘literature’ has been used differently in the past. In the eighteenth century it referred to ‘the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters as well as poems’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 15). The body of work labelled ‘literature’, Eagleton argues, played a significant role in establishing a social order, common values, and bringing the growing middle classes into line with the ideas and ideals of the aristocracy. Our present-day emphasis on the literary as creative and imaginative, he goes on to argue, was born with the Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as their revolutionary mission strove to reintroduce the ‘creative values’ that had been ‘expunged … by industrial capitalism... Literature had become a whole alternative ideology, and the “imagination” itself … becomes a political force’ (1996, p. 17). Our present-day use of ‘literature’ seems to be equally the product of the earlier eighteenth-century sense of valued writing as it is the more recent nineteenth-century radical emphasis on creativity and imagination as socially transformative forces. Our use incorporates both of these potentially contrasting notions of the literary, along with resonances of key cultural debates of the twentieth century...
eBook - ePub- Tonya Krouse, Tamara F. O'Callaghan(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Relating to a literary text may inspire our interest or curiosity, but relating is only a beginning: studying Literature means understanding what we read, making sense of it, and connecting it to broader and deeper contemplation about humanity. Finally, we should study Literature because doing so teaches the power and potential of human creativity. Who Gets to Decide Questions of Literary Merit, or, Why Are All Written Texts Not Considered Literature? Once we agree that Literature is worthy of study, we must ask ourselves who gets to decide what counts as Literature and who gets to make judgments about literary quality. Is all creative writing Literature? What makes a work creative? How do we measure the value, impact, originality, or success of creative works, and beyond what point do they achieve the status of Literature? Ultimately, our answers to these questions are not objective or universal: they are based on taste, preference, background, and many other factors. The literary canon, the group of texts that experts agree educated people should have read, grows out of decisions and judgments that readers make. From the emergence of literary studies in the nineteenth century up until the 1960s, people commonly believed that works made their way into the canon because of their universal appeal, their timeless relevance, their unquestionable aesthetic quality, and their historical importance. However, radical social change in the middle of the twentieth century, which involved the expansion of higher education to include women, people of color, and the working classes, instigated debates about the criteria used for determining canonical status...
