Literature as a social institution. Collection of works

“Literature as a Social Institute” is an almost peer of independent humanitarian science in Russia and one of the first books of the UFO Publishing House. For many years, its authors, sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin (1946–2014), sought to develop new approaches to cover the institute of literature as a whole, to explain how people build their reading circle and what social processes their choice is associated with. In their innovative and still actual study, scientists continued to study the problematic map of the sociology of literature, introducing this discipline to the scientific context of Russia in the mid-1990s. The reader of the book will get acquainted with the history of the concepts of “literature” and “novel”, with the formation of fiction as an institution and isolation within its framework of classics, avant -garde and mass literature, which are in relations between mutual repulsion and mutual influence. The authors trace complex and often conflicting relationships between writers, publishers, bookseller, literary critics, readers and teachers, analyze the role of magazines in the literary process, study the influence of the image of the book on the reader"s audience. The new edition is supplemented by a number of authors close in terms of the problems of articles and the preface by L. Gudkov with reflections on the significance of this project.
2nd edition, supplemented