Description
Book SynopsisThe Business of Letters is a broad-ranging study of authorial economics in antebellum America that describes writers' exchange practices as profoundly rooted in, and constitutive of, social bonds.
Trade Review"I have no question but that Jackson has written a fine book, one that recovers for readers in the twenty-first century the varied rewards for writers in the nineteenth century. He is a superb and patient researcher with a particular sensitivity to the social context of literary achievement. The Business of Letters is a work of impressive emulation, well warranting scholarly approbation." --
The Edgar Allan Poe Review"Jackson's monograph is by turns imaginative, thoroughly researched, and deftly realized." --
Journal of American History"Leon Jackson's clear-headed and rich analysis of the complex cultural and economic behaviors that constituted authorship in the decades prior to the Civil War compellingly redirects current discussions of American literary authorship and will have a significant impact on a large and growing body of scholarship." -- Jeffrey Groves * Harvey Mudd College *
"
The Business of Letters offers a compelling prospect on the American literary landscape from independence to the Civil War. With a capacious view of authors, editors, and readers in a changing social and economic setting, this work is the most theoretically sophisticated and historically informed that I have read in years." -- Robert A. Gross * University of Connecticut, Storrs *
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments 000 Preface: The Business of The Business of Letters 000 One From the Profession of Authorship to the Business of Letters 000 The Professional Paradigm 000 Toward a Theory of Multiple Economies 000 Economies Embedded and Disembedded 000 The Disembedding of the Economy 000 Two The Black Bard and the Black Market 000 George Moses Horton and the Black Market 000 "Bid the Vassal Rise" 000 Manumission Campaigns 000 The Hope of Liberty 000 Taking Liberties 000 Other Bards, Other Markets 000 Three Authorship and Gift Exchange 000 "Tablets of vanity; archives of pride and flattery": Albums 000 "I write to you out of mere humanity": Letters 000 "Damn you send me a paper": Exchange Networks 000 "Hammydiddle in plenty but no pay": The Southern Literary Messenger 000 The Freeing of the Gift 000 Four Toward a History of Literary Debt 000 Accounting for Subscriber Dereliction 000 Rural Economics and Traditional Debt Ways 000 The World of the Literary Dun 000 The Discrediting of the American Reader 000 The New Yorker and the Return of Literary Credit 000 Five Literary Competitions and the Culture of Emulation 000 The Culture of Emulation 000 The Park Street Competition 000 The Example of Charles Sprague 000 Prize Inflation and Prize Criticism 000 Edgar Allan Poe and the World of Competitions 000 The Routinization of the Prize 000 Epilogue: From the Business of Letters to the Profession of Authorship 000 Notes 000 Index 000
