A data visualization comparing bestselling and prize winning books

Editors’ Choice: How Cultural Capital Works – Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading

This new essay published in Post45 is about the relationship between prizewinning novels and their economic counterparts, bestsellers. It is about the ways in which social distinction is symbolically manifested within the contemporary novel and how we read social difference through language. Not only can we observe very strong stylistic differences between bestselling and prizewinning writing, but this process of cultural distinction appears to revolve most strongly around the question of time.

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