Writing and Society Research Centre seminar

This paper employs bibliometric data to track the publication of single-author short story collections since the year 2000. This data demonstrates that the publication of story collections is highly variable from year-to-year, which suggests that this form is more vulnerable to changes in symbolic capital than other forms, such as the novel, which are more economically central to the publishing industry itself. In this sense, short story collections provide a unique vantage point for understanding how literary mediation functions in the contemporary Australian publishing industry.