Diversity in the Large-Scale Pole of Literary Production: An Analysis of Publishers’ Lists and the Dutch Literary Space,2000–2009

Abstract

This article analyses the structure of the Dutch literary space through an analysis of 215 publishers’ lists of Dutch fiction and poetry publishers. Examining the ways in which publishers include different genre-language combinations on their lists offers a novel way to understand the structure of literary spaces. Earlier research has mainly seen analyses of the organisational field and the practices of actors, and until now has neglected the publishers’ lists of publishing houses. This neglect is critical as it has simplified ideas about what publishing houses actually publish on the different poles of contemporary literary fields. My analysis of the Dutch literary space shows that, besides small poetry publishers, all other publishers – in terms of their publishers’ lists – are part of the large-scale pole of literary production, but that this large-scale pole is much more diverse and complex than conceptualised in earlier research.