The prescription of Good Books: The formation of the discourse and cultural authority of literature in modern Thailand (1860s--1950s)

This dissertation examines the formation and transformation of the discourse of Good Books in Thailand between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. It argues that the idea and practice of prescribing Good Books were a response by the Thai royal elite to the emergence and expansion of the modern public sphere that they could no longer control. They were the elite's strategies deployed to reconfigure their authority and to discipline the public by setting up standard criteria for what was a good work of literature and what should be valued, read, and preserved. Since then, the discourse of Good Books has become a significant site of cultural authority in which various individuals and groups in Thai society---emergent professional writers, nationalist and state intellectuals, leftist-socialist writers and critics, and contemporary educationalists and publishers---have sought to register their tastes, interests, beliefs, and ideologies. From this perspective, Good Books is a mode of not only literary but also social, cultural, and ideological demarcation.;These individuals and groups have engaged with the discourse of Good Books not simply by consecrating particular works, e.g., creating a list of the best or awarding a prize, but, more importantly, by constructing and prescribing what I shall call "discursive determinants"---schemes that define and demarcate which are Good Books and which are not. These determinants come in various forms: sets of linguistic and rhetorical criteria such as politeness and correctness, literary classifications such as wannakhadi (literature) and ruang an len (fiction), artistic concepts such as wannasin (literary art) and aesthetic value, narrative structures such as the history of Thai literature, and discourses on the function of literature such as literature as a pedagogy of life, literature as a representation of national culture, and literature for life and for people.;This study focuses on the historical moments and conditions in which these determinants were formulated and disseminated. It is through this series of the constitution of determinants that the discourse of Good Books has continuously shaped the field of literature, and thereby cultural hegemony. In this regard, this dissertation is thus not simply about books that are good or not-quite-so-good; it is more essentially about the history of knowledge formation and distribution, and the politics of culture in modern Thailand.