The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian

In Canada, as elsewhere, major literary prizes certify the works they distinguish, spurring a more intensive engagement with them at the levels of criticism, pedagogy, and popular culture, and effecting a major shift in the way this literature is discussed and evaluated, marketed and consumed. Literary prizes are now a major part of the “social-commercial-cultural mechanisms” that, as James F. English asserts, shape national literatures. The \nScotiabank Giller Prize is a Canadian instance of the economy of prestige, and, as the dissertation argues, an institution that exercises broad cultural influence. This study is the first sustained effort to gauge this influence and grapple with its implications for the Giller and its corpus of books. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and the literary field, and on English’s work on prizes, the study equates prestige variously with symbolic, social, political and economic capital. It examines the ways the Giller amassed this capital, and how it negotiates its cultural sphere to preserve and bolster it. One of the aims here was to determine whether the Giller is prestigious enough to affect a contemporary Canadian fiction canon. A number of indicators of influence are used to demonstrate that the prize does participate in one or several canon-shaping processes. Another aim was to theorize the Giller corpus. Accordingly, the study hones in on changes in the material conditions of book production and marketing of the past three decades to identify some of the Giller books’ main features. The study concludes by proposing a new theoretical framework, which provides criteria to assess the impact of a literary prize. It explains the Giller’s specific strategies and functions, including its synergetic institutional alliances, and the fiction it curates for its intended readers. This framework accounts for the Giller’s success—as a prize that is adaptive, and both competes with and supports other literary institutions—in what is posited as a cultural ecosystem. \nThe first chapter examines Canada’s literary field before and during the Giller’s founding, and argues that the fledgling prize garnered cultural and political capital by supporting multiculturalism and related developments in Canadian literature. The Giller turned itself into a glamorous spectacle, but it also acquired legitimacy and influence due to the kinds of fiction it celebrated, and by making itself relevant to a national audience or reading public. Chapter 2 uses quantifiable measures to demonstrate the impact of the prize on celebrated books and authors. The chapter also discusses non-quantifiable indicators of prestige, arguing that the Giller raised its national and international status by instrumentalizing televisual and Internet-based technologies, strategies intended to increase “audience”/reader engagement and followers at home and abroad. Chapter 3 looks at the Giller’s corpus, scrutinizing its lists from 1994 to 2016, and highlighting key developments and changes in the Giller’s practices. The chapter then discusses the Giller’s efforts to popularize its books, theorizing that its marketing of culture and reliance on the televisual (with its admixture of the popular and cosmopolitan) shapes the promotional paratexts associated with the Giller, and is reflected in the books selected for celebration and the readerships it targets. Chapter 4 challenges allegations that the Giller commodifies or contains diversity (in line with neoliberalism’s tendency to colonize the cultural sphere and homogenize literature). It argues that for writers, judges, and the Giller itself there is enough individual and institutional autonomy to balance artistic aims with perceived obligations. Chapter 5 offers close readings of texts to demonstrate the \nGiller’s increasingly heterogeneous approach to valuing Canadian fiction. The Conclusion lends theoretical support to assertions made in Chapters 4 and 5 by borrowing \nkey concepts from ecology, such as adaptation, symbiosis, and diversity. For example, since diversity is of benefit to an ecosystem as a whole, the Giller’s increased support for \ndiversity of fiction in Canada assists its cultural habitat (the community of writers, publishers, and literary critics in its entirety), while augmenting its own importance and \nthat of its 26-year-old corpus of books.

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