Capital Letters : Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market.
Title:
Capital Letters : Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market.
Author:
Dowling, David.
ISBN:
9781587298349
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (231 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant: The Transformation of Literary Economics, 1820-61 -- Part 1: Crusading for Social Justice -- 1. Other and More Terrible Evils: Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda -- 2. Alert, Adventurous, and Unwearied: Market Values in Thoreau's Economies of Subsistence Living and Writing -- Part 2: Transforming the Market -- 3. Capital Sentiment: Fanny Fern's Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher's Code -- 4. Transcending Capital: Whitman's Poet Figure and the Marketing of Leaves of Grass -- Part 3: Worrying the Woman Question -- 5. Dollarish All Over: Rebecca Harding Davis's Market Success and the Economic Perils of Transcendentalism -- 6. Satirizing the Spheres: Refiguring Gender and Authorship in Melville -- Dreams Deferred: Ambition and the Mass Market in Melville and King -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.
Abstract:
In the 1840s and 1850s, as the market revolution swept the United States, the world of literature confronted for the first time the gaudy glare of commercial culture. Amid growing technological sophistication and growing artistic rejection of the soullessness of materialism, authorship passed from an era of patronage and entered the clamoring free market. In this setting, romantic notions of what it meant to be an author came under attack, and authors became professionals.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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