Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (AUTOSTORY)

AUTOSTORY harnesses narrative theory and literary sociology to analyse authors’ narrative rhetoric in the 21st-century story economy. The contemporary dominance of personal storytelling across platforms crucially affects all actors in the literary field as it foregrounds the author’s bodily and social habitus, moral positioning and ethos, experiential knowledge, and public identity work. AUTOSTORY provides actors in the literary field – from researchers to journalists, publishers, audiences, and the authors themselves – with critical insight on how social media driven publicity affects literary expression and contributes to the loss of autonomy of the literary field.

The project develops a new paradigm in authorship studies and challenges existing approaches in literary sociology and narrative studies by studying digital and narrative capital as intermingled elements reshaping the contemporary literary field. We combine the analysis of text-internal narrative ethos and text-external social habitus of authors to find out how contemporary authors gain and use narrative and digital capital across genres and platforms. We conduct a qualitative cross-analysis of 24 contemporary European authors’ literary oeuvres, other public texts and media performance, and their reception in different media platforms during 2010–2025. The target authors come from dominant (United Kingdom, Ireland, France), semi-peripheral (Sweden, Denmark, Norway), and peripheral (Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Iceland) language areas.

We collaborate with international partners in harvesting the social media data of target authors, expanding our methods to be applied on new corpora, and training scholars across disciplines in analysing transmedial authorship and rhetoric. The research team, headed by leading narrative theorists and literary sociologists and featuring talented theorists from both paradigms, is ideally positioned to prepare the literary field for the future where forms and platforms of storytelling are increasingly collapsing into each other.