A place on the periphery: Brazilian women fiction writers at the borders of the publishing industry

The digital revolution brought many changes to the cultural industries; by extension, publishing has also undergone some transformations. These shifts have added new responsibilities to the already busy life of fiction writers. As they continue to deal with precarity and difficulties in publishing their books, they are now expected to be in direct contact with readers over the internet and manage their authorial image online. The impacts of these new practices on the writers' careers and authorial identities have been analysed by many scholars; however, the experience of writers who sit at the margins of the literary field has received scarce academic attention. Thus, this research aims to fill that gap by investigating the authorial experience and identity of Brazilian women writers at the peripheries of the literary scene. To this end, I conducted in-depth interviews with 28 women writers from Brazil, a Global South country. These writers' status as Brazilian puts them at the borders of the literary world system, while some are also at the borders of Brazilian society. Their variegated positionalities mean this work uses a multifaceted idea of marginality. Furthermore, these women come from many different backgrounds, making this thesis an intersectional study that examines diverse lived experiences of authorship. The testimonies provided by these authors were thematically analysed and generated a coding scheme that yielded three main themes: identity, relationships and career. Evaluating the sub-themes in these thematic divisions provided many insights into the authorial practice of fringe writers. It showed that the authorial identity of writers at the industry's periphery is a complex, varied identity marked by a defiance of the status quo. The thematic analysis also revealed that these artists are carving a space for themselves at the borders of the conventional book markets. The existence of said spaces, which I call literary proto-markets, is mainly made possible due to the abovementioned technological advances. This study sees these proto-markets as spaces where fringe authors can be in contact with readers and each other, exchange commodities and do what they love most – write.