The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-century Literary Marketplace
- ISBN-10
- 0190274026
- ISBN-13
- 9780190274023
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 217
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Susan M. Ryan
Description
The Moral Economies of American Authorship argues that the moral character of authors became a kind of literary property within mid-nineteenth-century America's expanding print marketplace, shaping the construction, promotion, and reception of texts as well as of literary reputations. Using a wide range of printed materials--prefaces, dedications, and other paratexts as well as book reviews, advertisements, and editorials that appeared in the era's magazines and newspapers--The Moral Economies of American Authorship recovers and analyzes the circulation of authors' moral currency, attending not only to the marketing of apparently ironclad status but also to the period's not-infrequent author scandals and ensuing attempts at recuperation. These preoccupations prove to be more than a historical curiosity-they prefigure the complex (if often disavowed) interdependence of authorial character and literary value in contemporary scholarship and pedagogy. Combining broad investigations into the marketing and reception of books with case studies that analyze the construction and repair of particular authors' reputations (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Prince, Elizabeth Keckley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and E.D.E.N. Southworth), the book constructs a genealogy of the field's investments in and uses of authorial character. In the nineteenth century's deployment of moral character as a signal element in the marketing, reception, and canonization of books and authors, we see how biography both vexed and created literary status, adumbrating our own preoccupations while demonstrating how malleable-and how recuperable-moral authority could be.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2015-12-29
- 256 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing
By Michael J. EvertonKeane suggests that Paine read a version ofRaynal's text printed by Bell “in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1781” (Tom Paine, 230). While Bell did eventually reprint the book twice in 1782, he did so only after Paine had already ...
-
Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book
By Ronald J. Zboray, Mary Saracino Zboraylivok (1'hiladelphia: American Sunday -School Union, 1858); idem, Ships in the Mist, and Other Stories (Boston: Hoyt, I860); idem, Leila among the Mountains (Boston: Hoyt, 1861). Little is known about Hoyt; see David Dzwonkoski, ...
-
Women (Re)Writing Milton
By Mandy Green, Sharihan Al-AkhrasThis volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, ...
-
The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat
By Johannes VoelzThe Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.
-
Plagiarama!: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions
By Geoffrey SanbornOffers a novel reading of the abolitionist writer's plagiarism, arguing the act was a means of capitalizing on the energies of mass-cultural entertainments popularized by showmen such as P. T. Barnum.
-
Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment
By Wendy Dasler Johnson... 123, 203; sentimental semiotics and desire, 184–86; transcendentalism, 32, 112, 187; use of metonymy, 18, 32; Williams on, 187; women as resistant readers of, 202. See also Passion-Flowers collection (Howe) Howe, Samuel Gridley, ...
-
Economies of Writing: Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition
By Susan M. Ryan, Bruce Horner, Brice Nordquist17. Democratic Rhetoric in the Era of Neoliberalism - Phyllis Mentzell Ryder -- Afterword: Lessons Learned - Deborah Brandt -- References -- About the Authors -- Index
-
Ethics of Writing
By Sean BurkeThe ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This original and courageous study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing.
-
America's Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures
By Jerome ChristensenTrotsky, Leon, 270 Trouble with Harry, The, 234 Truffaut, Francois, 246, 267, 271 Trumpener, Katie, 363n20 Turner, Lana, 151 Turner, Ted, 306 Twelve O'Clock High, 8, 139 Twentieth-Century Fox, 3, 5, 8,13, 59, 115,154, 157, 245, 246, ...
-
The Parody Exception in Copyright Law
By Sabine JacquesThis is the first book in English to offer an in-depth investigation into the parody exception in copyright law, and comments on industry practices linked to this form of creative endeavours.