Title American literature and the culture of reprinting, 1834-1853 / Meredith L. McGill

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©2003

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 364 pages) : illustrations Series Material texts Material texts. Contents The Matter of the Text -- Commerce, Print Culture, and the Authority of the State in American Copyright Law -- Discontinuities in the Genealogy ofAuthorship -- Materiality and the Common Law in Wheaton v. Peters -- Dissemination and the State -- "Perfect Title": American Copyright and the Letter of the Law -- International Copyright and the Political Economy of P'rint -- Legalizing Piracy -- Representing the Nation: The Campaign for International Copyright -- Decentering the Market: Defending the System of Reprinting -- Maintaining Decentralization: Reprinting and the Syncopation of the National Imaginary -- Circulating Media: Charles Dickens, Reprinting, and the Dislocation of American Culture -- Property in Dickens: The i842 Tour -- National Debt and National Identity: The American Circulation of American Notes for General Circulation -- Representing Decentralization: The Narrative Structure of American Notes -- Circulation and Slavery -- Martin Chuzzlewit, the Social Order, and the Medium of Print -- Unauthorized Poe -- Embracing Secondarity -- Dislocating Reference -- Elaboration, Eclecticism, and the Deferral of Authorship -- Authentic Facsimiles -- Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity -- James Russell Lowell and the "Be-Mirrorment" of Poe -- Removing the Anonymous: Young America and the Control of Dissemination -- Narratives ofAbsolute Possession and Dispossession: Authorial Identity in "The Little Longfellow War" -- Disowning Ownership: Poe's Evason of Identity at the Boston Lyceum -- Suspended Animation: Hawthorne and the Relocation of Narrative Authority -- The Uses of Obscurity -- "Sleeping Beauty in the Waxworks": Monotony and Repose in Early Hawthorne -- Monotony and Declension: The Properties of Narrative in The House of the Seven Gables -- "Time-Stricken" : Narrative Disruption and Self-Indictment -- "Sordid Contact": Addressing Ordinary Life and the Disenchantments of Address -- Authorship and the Power of Humiliation Summary The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades. In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-350) and index Notes In English Print version record Subject Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 -- Relations with publishers Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Relations with publishers Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Relations with publishers SUBJECT Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 fast Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 fast Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 fast Subject American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism Literature publishing -- United States -- History -- 19th century Authors and publishers -- United States -- History -- 19th century Copyright -- United States -- History -- 19th century LITERARY CRITICISM -- Books & Reading. American literature Authors and publishers Copyright Literature publishing Relations with publishers United States Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2002029146 ISBN 0812209745 9780812209747

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