Contemporary Literary Studies and Bourdieu’s Legacy

How can we theoretically grasp the rapidly transforming world of the 21st century? What frameworks allow us to understand global cultural dynamics, digital disruptions, and shifting social orders analytically? Contemporary Literary Studies and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Comparative Frameworks for a Globalised Cultural Field argues that Pierre Bourdieu offers a powerful yet often underappreciated set of tools to address precisely these questions.

The book revisits Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and tests its explanatory power against transnational, postcolonial, and technological contexts that the original framework was never designed to address. Structured in two parts, it first undertakes a conceptual revision of field analysis – distinguishing internationalization from transnationalization, introducing an ecological framework for literary diversity and cultural sustainability, and examining the relation between autonomy and heteronomy. It then confronts these revised categories with concrete case studies: European translation policy, the trajectory of sociologically informed literary style, the postcolonial transformation of Bourdieu's concepts in Latin America, and the disruptive entry of generative AI into struggles over literary authorship. It treats field theory not as a closed system but as an adaptable instrument whose value lies in the questions it enables – about the formation of positions, the shifting of boundaries, and the struggles that reshape cultural fields under new historical pressures.