“À la recherche…” of a circulation history in high demand fictions

Abstract

Literary history has long been marked by its national scale, stiffened by the weight of constructing «imagined communities», concept disseminated by Benedict Anderson. This perspective has often lead to neglecting the international aspect of a book trade that, nevertheless, follows the same logic of capitalistic expansion as other markets. Widening of the study scope, we moved “beyond the text”, onto unpublished archives, but also onto designing new tools. The “globalizing” ambition of the history of publishing can be associated with the study of media circulation in order to go beyond monographs or intercrossed histories, and put complex processes on the agenda, provide overviews of literary mobilities, and extend the singularity of time and space it tackles. For this purpose, we analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively the trajectory of two literary works throughout the twentieth century: the popular novel series Fantômas and the canonical novel Du côté de chez Swann.

Keywords: media culture; popular culture; world history.