3. Autonomy

This chapter examines autonomy as an underexplored but central concept in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of literature. It traces his account of the French literary field as the product of a long process of differentiation, autonomisation, and symbolic capital accumulation, through which literature acquired its own rules, values, hierarchies, and forms of authority. It then focuses on Bourdieu’s analysis of the French literary field in the nineteenth century, his principal historical case for examining how literary autonomy was established, sustained, and eventually converted into a platform for political intervention. Particular attention is given to the opposition between art and money, the material and symbolic conditions that sustained relatively independent literary production, and Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus Affair. The chapter also examines Bourdieu’s later claim that, in the contemporary literary and cultural fields, autonomy was being eroded by commercial concentration, media consecration, and new forms of patronage.