Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola, by Jonathan Paine, was published by Harvard University Press in August 2019.
Paine, a literary scholar and investment banker, applies economic criticism to canonical novels, changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.