1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910826553903321

Autore

Dowling David Oakey <1967->

Titolo

Capital letters [[electronic resource] ] : authorship in the antebellum literary market / / by David Dowling

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Iowa City, : University of Iowa Press, c2009

ISBN

1-58729-834-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (231 p.)

Disciplina

810.9/003

Soggetti

American literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Authorship - Economic aspects - United States - History - 19th century

Authorship - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century

Authors, American - 19th century - Economic conditions

Authors and publishers - United States - History - 19th century

Literature and society - United States - History - 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-211) and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

In the 1840's and 1850's, 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.