Bestselling author Agatha Christie’s crime and mystery novels have been translated into over 100 languages. E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has been translated into 52 languages. Australian author Richard Flanagan’s Booker award-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North has been published in 42 territories. Why do some novels ‘travel’—as the bookindustry describes the global trade in publishing rights—better than others? Conditions of Access is a data-driven, conceptually and methodologically innovative study of the structural and material factors that enable – and constrain – the circulation of novels through the trade in the rights to books in what the author introduces as the‘global literary marketspace’. Significantly, it argues that no work can enter the space into which it might be considered ‘world literature’ without first entering this intermediate space– a space that has, until now, been overlooked by scholars. Adapting an approach developed by the European sociology of translation school, employing digital literary cartography as a research method and using a new kind of bibliographic database, Conditions of Access uses the Australian literary field as a case study in the rights trade. This reveals a new narrative about genre, gender and its relationship to the international literary field, a new trading model that can be employed by practitioners – anduncovers a new story of how, and why, literature circulates globally.
