Discusses artistic works within the contexts of the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Addresses many of the issues that have consumed literary, art, and cultural criticism over the past decade: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertexuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.

CONTENTS
Preface.
Editor's introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture.

Part I. The field of Cultural Production.

  1. The field of cultural production, or: the economic world reversed.
  2. The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic
      goods.
  3. The market of symbolic goods.

Part II. Flaubert and the French literary Field.

  4. Is the structure of sentimental education an instance of social self-
      analysis?
  5. Field of power, literary field and habitus.
  6. Principles for a sociology of cultural works.
  7. Flaubert's point of view.

Part III. The pure gaze: essays on art.

  8. Outline of a sociological theory of art perception.
  9. Manet and the institutionalization of anomie.
10. The historical genesis of a pure aesthetic.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Discusses artistic works within the contexts of the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Addresses many of the issues that have consumed literary, art, and cultural criticism over the past decade: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertexuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.