Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market » (1)

David Dowling is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa.

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.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant
The Transformation of Literary Economics, 1820–61 • 1
Part 1: Crusading for Social Justice • 25
1. Other and More Terrible Evils
Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Proslavery
Propaganda • 27
2. Alert, Adventurous, and Unwearied
Market Values in Thoreau’s Economies of Subsistence Living
and Writing • 44

Part 2: Transforming the Market • 63
3. Capital Sentiment
Fanny Fern’s Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher’s Code • 65
4. Transcending Capital
Whitman’s Poet Figure and the Marketing of Leaves of Grass • 82

Part 3 Worrying the Woman Question • 107
5. Dollarish All Over
Rebecca Harding Davis’s Market Success and the Economic Perils
of Transcendentalism • 109
6. Satirizing the Spheres
Refiguring Gender and Authorship in Melville • 127
Dreams Deferred
Ambition and the Mass Market in Melville and King • 145

Notes • 173
Works Cited • 199
Index • 213