TEN DAYS IN RUSSIA - Dr. Jonathan Paine Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford

“How does Writing for Money Affect what is Written?” Dr. Paine’s talk draws on the main themes of his book, Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola, published by Harvard University Press in 2019. Combining close readings of works by Balzac and Dostoevsky with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, his paper will discuss how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. He argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value. The proposition redefines economic criticism as an undervalued tool of literary criticism.

Dr. Paine is Senior Advisor and former Managing Director at the investment bank Rothschild & Co. He serves as the treasurer of the International Dostoevsky Society.