Negotiating Creativity

Drawing from extensive experience as both professional writer and academic, Dan Anthony explores how writers throughout history have balanced artistic vision with market realities, and how this negotiation plays out today.

Negotiating Creativity presents literature, creative writing and art in an economic context. It explores the dynamic between artists and consumers through what one might call entrepreneurial processes. On one level it is a guide to practical issues concerning creative production today; on the other, it is a thought experiment exploring our understanding of creativity. From Aphra Behn’s experiences in Stuart England to Percival Everett’s in Trump’s USA, Anthony explores how the relationship between author/artist and markets developed, and how the process of negotiating creativity connects contemporary creative writers and artists with their predecessors.

In the age of AI, the distinctly human nature of negotiating with creativity remains a critical, enduring feature of the way we both make and understand creative work. This book will appeal to researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students in the overlapping fields of creative writing, writing and literary studies, the arts and the creative industries.