Research On Occidental Literary Agents

In the developed countries like Great Britain and the USA, literary agent has been recognized as a full-time profession since 1860s. After over 100 years development,the literary agent business have already established a mature institution in terms of its operation, management and codes of conduct, which have provided the publishing industry the solid institutional base for its healthy development and fast expansion of overseas market.The Chinese publishing industry have been undergoing deeper reform, in order to achieve the goal of "going global of Chinese books", there are growing discussions over the topic whether we should introduce the literary agent institution to the Chinese publishing industry. In this background, we should conduct an intensive and comprehensive research on western literary agent business from multiple disciplinary perspectives,There are totally five sections in the thesis. First section gives a brief introduction of literary agent's activities and summarized the purport, the theory, the method of my subject. Section two first defines the research scope and then analyzed the industry codes of conduct. In the following section, it elaborates the major business activities:literary rights representation and overseas intellectual property rights as well as their working processes. The fourth section mainly focus on the future prospects of the literary agent's business——the literary websites started to take parts of the literary agents'function, the literary agent' work will extend to book publishing area. In the fifth section, based on the above analysis, it come to the conclusion:the codes of conduct of literary agent's business should be established and improved, which serve as the institution to ensure the breadth and depth of Chinese books IPR exportation.In the meantime, literary agent's involvement can not only change the unbalanced information situation between authors and publishers, but also cultivate a favorable environment for writers. Besides, the profits of publishing industry will be redistributed to the benefit of intellectual property rights' creators, which will be greatly contributed to the prosperity of culture industry.