The moral economies of American authorship : reputation, scandal, and the nineteenth-century literary marketplace
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Bibliographic Information
The moral economies of American authorship : reputation, scandal, and the nineteenth-century literary marketplace
（Oxford studies in American literary history, 11）
Oxford University Press, c2016
- : hardback
Available at / 2 libraries
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Kobe University General Library / Library for Intercultural Studies
: hardback930-29-R061201600505
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The Moral Economies of American Authorship argues that the moral character of authors became a kind of literary property within mid-nineteenth-century America's expanding print marketplace, shaping the construction, promotion, and reception of texts as well as of literary reputations. Using a wide range of printed materials-prefaces, dedications, and other paratexts as well as book reviews, advertisements, and editorials that appeared in the era's magazines
and newspapers-The Moral Economies of American Authorship recovers and analyzes the circulation of authors' moral currency, attending not only to the marketing of apparently ironclad status but also to the period's not-infrequent author scandals and ensuing attempts at recuperation. These preoccupations
prove to be more than a historical curiosity-they prefigure the complex (if often disavowed) interdependence of authorial character and literary value in contemporary scholarship and pedagogy. Combining broad investigations into the marketing and reception of books with case studies that analyze the construction and repair of particular authors' reputations (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Prince, Elizabeth Keckley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and E.D.E.N. Southworth), the book
constructs a genealogy of the field's investments in and uses of authorial character. In the nineteenth century's deployment of moral character as a signal element in the marketing, reception, and canonization of books and authors, we see how biography both vexed and created literary status,
adumbrating our own preoccupations while demonstrating how malleable-and how recuperable-moral authority could be.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Moral Markets
- Chapter 1. Fenimore Cooper, Property, and the Trials of National Authorship
- Chapter 2. Paratexts and the Making of Moral Authority
- Chapter 3. Frederick Douglass's Marketing of Moral Repair
- Chapter 4. The Currency of Reputation
- Chapter 5. Stowe, Byron, and the Art of Scandal
- Epilogue: Reputation Redux
- Notes
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
