Sabbatical Pieter Vermeulen: World Literary Value

During this sabbatical period, I am working on a research project that studies how, within the field of contemporary Anglophone literature, value is assigned to literature in general and certain literary works in particular. Using insights from the domains of literary sociology and the field of valuation studies, the project aims to analyze how different actors in the literary field (authors, critics, publishers, and literary texts) articulate and motivate the value of literature in a time when that value is becoming less and less self-evident.