The grand chorus of complaint : authors and the business ethics of American publishing
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The grand chorus of complaint : authors and the business ethics of American publishing
Oxford University Press, c2011
Available at / 5 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for executing a bookseller, and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition-calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called "the conflict of the ages," the feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be
conducted. The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a study of the terms of that feud in early America. Ranging from the Revolution to the Civil War, Michael Everton explores moral propriety in American literary culture, arguing that debates over the business of authorship and publishing in the first century
of the United States were simultaneously debates over the ethics and character of capitalism.
The Grand Chorus of Complaint shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from the "real" issues affecting American literary culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. Drawing on a diverse archive, Everton argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercial
world preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. This study illustrates that ethics should matter as much to literary and book historians as much as it has come to matter-again-to literary critics and theorists.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 - The Character of the Trade
- Chapter 2 - Liberty in Business: The Printing of Common Sense
- Chapter 3 - Hannah Adams and the Courtesies of Authorship
- Chapter 4 - The Moral Vernacular of American Copyright Reform
- Chapter 5 - Melville in the Antebellum Publishing Maelstrom
- Chapter 6 - The Tact of Ruthless Hall
- Epilogue - What Lies Back of the Contract
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"