Distant Aesthetics: Amazon's Impacts on the Aesthetic of the Novel

This thesis will examine the effect that the books retailer, Amazon, has had on the Booker Prize. Specifically, it will explore the ways that Amazon has shaped the kinds of books that have featured in the Booker Prize’s shortlist and longlist in the years between 1998, when the company launched in Britain, and 2009. My wager is that the Booker Prize, or the "Booker” as I will refer to it in this thesis, has steadily come to recognise a different kind of novel as being worthy of its attention and that it has done so as a consequence of Amazon.