TY - JOUR A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Gerhards, Jürgen T1 - Literary Myths and Social Structure JF - Social Forces N2 - The lives of writers are subject to a variety of myths. This article shows that such cultural perceptions of writers bear a close affinity to the social structure of literature in modern societies. Two structural properties seem to encourage the proliferation of myths about writers: (1) the existence of a group of prominent writers who occupy unique social positions and form an amorphous elite and (2) the relation between the elite and the large group of lesser-known, peripheral writers. Elite amorphousness and high relational density among the elite and peripheral "groupness" and sparseness of literary relations among the periphery emerge as two major properties of the social structure. These counterintuitive properties are useful in understanding myth generation in literature; they allow for competing "views" of the social structure, views that seem to develop into contradictory myths of the modern writer. Data on several types of ties among writers were collected and analyzed with block model techniques. KW - Writers KW - Social structures KW - Poetry KW - Authors KW - Folk culture KW - High culture KW - Cultural customs KW - Social networking KW - Literary criticism KW - Prophets Y1 - 1991 U6 - https://doi.org/10.2307/2579476 VL - 69 IS - 3 SP - 811 EP - 830 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -