There were two big stories out of the British publishing world this week that don’t at first glance seem to have much to do with each other: the Man Booker announced that they would accept entries from any English-speaking country and the BBC’s National Short Story award revealed--and then felt the need to explain--an all-female shortlist. The change in the Man Booker was the more obviously controversial event, but both announcements are linked because the anxious discussions around them say quite a bit about how we think about literary categories today.
First for the Man Booker Prize’s global expansion: this was a controversial announcement because it means that American authors will now be eligible to compete for a prize that had previously been open only to British, Irish, and Commonwealth writers. Many who were critical of the move, like Philip Hensher, say that the prize will lose its uniquely British identity by going global, whereas those who support it say that it’s time to open the prize up to all English-speaking writers. Critics like Hensher fear that opening up the prize means that it will be dominated by the economic clout of the U.S., and thus British authors will lose a major international stage on which to showcase their work. On the other hand, Gaby Wood at the Telegraph and others argue that U.S. authors aren’t likely to crowd out British ones. Further, as Wood puts it, if that’s the fear, maybe British authors “should perhaps think of upping their game.” Liz Bury at the Guardian offers a useful overview of both sides here.
In my mind, this is a tough one. I both accept the argument that placing international boundaries around the prize is artificial and wish the prize could stay as it is. The prize is, in some ways, more meaningful as a measure of literary merit if it takes into account the entire world of fiction in English. At the same time, I like the idea of the prize as it is because it highlights authors that don’t necessarily get the same attention here in the U.S. The question is, what is the prize *really* about? It seems that U.K. and Commonwealth authors would answer that question differently than the Prize organizers.
As for the BBC’s National Short Story shortlist, for the second time in its eight-year history, it is composed entirely of women. The Chair of Judges, Mariella Frostrup, explained that:
“The 2013 shortlist is all female, which suggests the short story is a form much suited to the innovative brilliance of women writers. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman - author of the enormously influential The Yellow Wallpaper - onwards, many favoured short story writers are women. Now we have five new names to add to the list of skilled exponents.”
The novelist Peter Hobbs made no attempts to explain the list in terms of gender: "We've got to the stage where an all-female list is not even worth mentioning, [...] I don't really pay any attention to gender."
I agree with Hobbs. I think that the attempt to explain the list as reflecting women’s particular talent for the short story makes an awkward gendered argument that doesn’t quite articulate its assumptions: is it that the smaller canvas of the short story is more suited to a woman’s interest in smaller details? What do we say, then, about the expansive canvas of something like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with working on a smaller canvas or paying attention to small details, but it feels like any attempt to explain an all-female shortlist for short stories will necessarily get mired in weirdly essentialist statements about what women are really good at.
On the whole, both of these announcements, and the conversations circling around them, have just as much to say about the state of literary and cultural studies as anything else. The last 10-20 years have called into question our ideas about the importance of national boundaries when talking about artistic production. The map of the Man Booker (which I discussed in my last post) shows how global and fluid the prize already is--although it also shows some parts of the world that it has not touched. Likewise, how do we talk about women’s literature (and women’s interests) these days? Feminism, and feminist recovery work, continues to make the point that women (and men) are interested in everything. Can we say there is a certain brand of literature that women are particularly good at? What would that even mean?
On the whole, these two announcements have raised some essential (or essentialist) questions about literature: is there some inherent quality to a national literature? Or women’s literature? Are these questions still relevant?
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