Going Public: Authorship and its Production in Antebellum America

"Going Public: Authorship in antebellum America" joins current theoretical and historical debates over the relationship between the writer and the marketplace. Moving away from romantic conceptions of this relationship as a binary opposition between the author and the market forces which would empty literary products of all but their exchange value as commodities, I present "authorship" as a variable rhetorical product of the legal, economic, technological and ideological conditions forming material practice in the publishing industry. Chapter One describes the rise of this industry and the consequent shift in the mode of literary production during the first half of the nineteenth century, and then outlines an emerging debate over the effect of this shift on the figure of the "author" and on literary culture as a whole. The next three chapters are inter-related case studies of three writers and their production as "authors" between 1829 and 1857. "Joining the Club" reconstructs the historical context of Poe's first and failed attempt to enter the fiction market with a book called Tales of the Folio Club, tracing even in this early attempt the rhetorical strategies he used to create and maintain the authorial image which gave his work value in the literary market. Expanding a view of Rufus Griswold generally limited to his relations with Poe, "The Agent as Producer" demonstrates the role of the literary agent in authorial production through an analysis of the legal, economic and social conditions informing Griswold's The Female Poets of America. Focusing on one of Griswold's beneficiaries, "Beyond Authorship" historicizes evidence from the unpublished autobiography and correspondence of Elizabeth Oakes Smith to demonstrate how Smith achieved cultural authority for herself and others of her sex by co-opting forces restricting her role as a "female author." Treating the infamous "death of the author" not as a theoretical end to author-study but as a demand for historical debate, this study reconstructs the "public" nature of authorship in antebellum America while providing new terms by which future literary historians might come to recognize "authors" of this period.