The paper sets out to put the cultural capital which literature possesses in its socio-historic context, with the aim of unveiling the discursive power of literature. The paper takes as its starting points of argument the analysis of the scarcity of culture (including cultural competence, cultural habitus and cultural products), the conditions of the symbolic power of literature, and the investigation of the monopolization of representational fields, the actualization modes of the symbolic capital of litera...