India, June 7 -- We might consider the Nobel Prize for Literature a holy pulpit that canonises a writer. Through it, "industrial money is gilded with royal glamour, scientific benefits, and cultural sophistication". The intimate connection between the "the cultural capital of high-brow literature. dynamite money from the donor and. the feudally rooted status of the old Swedish monarchy" has meant that the prize has always been under scrutiny. However, most books on the subject have been rich in myth but poor in scholarship. The process of the selection of laureates and how that has shaped the idea of "universal" literary values and defined literary quality across languages and cultures has rarely, if ever, been discussed. So, what mechanisms made it possible for 18 Swedish intellectuals, "randomly chosen persons in the remote town of Stockholm", to become the world's most influential literary critics with a power to exert an almost godlike influence on the literary world? Paul Tenngart's well-researched book, The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature, scours the history and future of the prize to explain the complex alchemy of how the prestigious prize has shaped, and continues to shape, the global literary canon. In addition to the fame, the Nobel comes with a larger sum of money than most prizes. Alfred Nobel donated more than 30 million Swedish crowns, which is the approximate of about $245 million today. Having money makes one earn more money, not only through interest and other capital gains, but also through the social and cultural attraction of economic success. This is how Nobel's generous donation led "an outdated and elitist closed circle of cultural power" to become empowered to judge the excellence of human endeavour. The cultish effect of the Nobel Prize for Literature has led other well-known prizes with a fundamentally international perspective on literature to be modelled on it. These include the Formentor, the Neustadt Prize, and the International Booker Prize, a spin-off of the Booker that, from 2005 onward, has awarded to literature originally written in any language but available in English translation. That Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel in 1913 because of the English translations of his Bengali poetry confirms Heilbron's notion of Anglophone hyper-centrality in literary traffic across markets and languages, and accounts for English being the most awarded literary language. This book raises questions about what constitutes world literature that the donor, Nobel himself, probably had no means to answer. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary theories and methods, this multifaceted work questions how the Swedish Academy has managed to uphold the global status of the prize through all the violent international crises of the last 120 years. It also examines the impact the Nobel has had on the distribution and significance of particular works, literatures and languages. Over the years, in its strenuous attempt to "recognize true and durable literary quality", Swedish intellectuals have missed the chance to award literary giants such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce. The subjectivity of the selection process, and its propensity to be run by high-minded literary cabals, has laid the prize open to criticisms of oversight and bias. Admittedly, canonisation points readers to authors whom they might not have cared to read without the Nobel tag. Tagore's literature prize lent widespread expediency to the act of reading him. The Nobel Committee has also been accused of holding Euro-centric attitudes, resulting in authors and texts from "remote parts" not being "consecrated". "The academy is often reproached for thus neglecting the literatures of Asia and Africa. Artur Lundkvist, an influential member of the Academy, infamously said in Svenska Dagbladet in 1977, "But I doubt if there is so far very much to find there." It was a comment as prejudiced as Thomas Macaulay's statement that "A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". Interestingly, sitting on the northern fringes of Europe, Stockholm and Sweden (its language spoken by only 0.1% of the world's population) do not enjoy a central position in the world. Yet, in "awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, the semi-peripheral Stockholm is the middle sibling of world literature," writes Tenngart. He believes the Nobel will "always" be a European prize that will never be able to "balance out the hierarchy between cultures, languages, and literatures," reinforced further by its "international importance". Over the years, the Academy has also drawn flak for its selections of Gao Xingjian, VS Naipaul, Imre Kertesz, Orhan Pamuk, Herta Muller, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mo Yan, all of whom have been accused of painting a false picture of their home countries. Many believed that their consecrations reinforced the authors' assumptions. It is clear that moral and political considerations often gained precedence over merit. This book attempts to prise open an institution with a culture of secrecy. One of its rules is that critics and scholars must wait 50 years until committee discussions of nominated authors can be made public. Tenngart believes the origin of this great secrecy is rooted in 18th-century Freemasonry. While it did usher in Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali, Gabriela Mistral's Chilean and Yasunari Kawabata's Japanese moorings and ushered politically entrenched writers such as Winston Churchill and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the World Republic of Letters, the Republic was built, Tenngart reminds us, on Western liberal ideology....