Of dynamite legacies and universal literary values

Paul Tenngart's The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature explores how the prestigious award has shaped and continues to shape the global literary canon

- Prasenjit Chowdhury

We might consider the Nobel Prize for Literature a holy pulpit that canonises a writer. Through it, "industrial money is gilded with royal glamour, scientific benefits, and cultural sophistication". The intimate connection between the "cultural capital of high-brow literature... dynamite money from the donor and... the feudally rooted status of the old Swedish monarchy" has meant that the prize has always been under scrutiny.

However, most books on the subject have been rich in myth but poor in scholarship. The process of the selection of laureates and how that has shaped the idea of "universal" literary values and defined literary quality across languages and cultures has rarely, if ever, been discussed. So, what mechanisms made it possible for 18 Swedish intellectuals, "randomly chosen persons in the remote town of Stockholm", to become the world's most influential literary critics with a power to exert an almost godlike influence on the literary world?

Paul Tenngart's well-researched book, The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature, scours the history and future of the prize to explain the complex alchemy of how the prestigious prize has shaped, and continues to shape, the global literary canon.