Literary commerce in the age of honnête publication -- The paradoxes of enlightenment publishing -- "Living by the pen": mythologies of modern authorial autonomy -- Economic claims and legal battles: writers turn to the market -- The reality of a new cultural field: the case of Rousseau
Summary
This study offers a new reading of the development of modern authorship in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, through a detailed reexamination of one of the central mythologies of this evolution: the author's passage from dependence on patronage to the autonomy of the market
