American Romanticism and the Marketplace
American Romanticism and the Marketplace

Author: Michael T. Gilmore

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0226293947

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"This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden."—Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, engagement with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within and through some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, American Romanticism and the Marketplace has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Times Literary Supplement "Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr, American Literature

James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace
James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace

Author: Sharon-Ruth Alker

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780754665694

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Responding to the resurgence of interest in the Scottish working-class writer James Hogg, Alker and Nelson offer the first edited collection devoted to a critical examination of his writings. The essays explore the varied and experimental works of Hogg to establish that they deserve a central place in Romantic studies and to demonstrate that they anticipate and address many recent concerns voiced in contemporary discussions of literature.

Trading Spaces
Trading Spaces

Author: Emma Hart

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-11-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 022665981X

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Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

Hawthorne and Melville
Hawthorne and Melville

Author: Jana L. Argersinger

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780820327518

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Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

Handbook of American Romanticism
Handbook of American Romanticism

Author: Philipp Löffler

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-07-05

Total Pages: 741

ISBN-13: 3110590905

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The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Second Stories
Second Stories

Author: Cynthia S. Jordan

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780807818398

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Second Stories offers an innovative reexamination of selected texts by seven major figures in American literature. Combining close reading with a powerful ideological argument, Cynthia Jordan demonstrates that a concern with the patriarchal politics of language informs both the thematic content and overall shape of much of the fiction of these writers.

American Literature and Immediacy
American Literature and Immediacy

Author: Heike Schaefer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1108487386

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Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

Incorporation, Authorship, and Anglo-American Literature (1815–1918)
Incorporation, Authorship, and Anglo-American Literature (1815–1918)

Author: Jasper Schelstraete

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1000357198

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Incorporation, Authorship, and Anglo-American Literature (1815–1918) is concerned with the new ways in which nineteenth-century authors came to imagine nationhood in response to the emergent global market. It investigates how authors negotiated a largely unregulated global economic space, both imaginatively—in their representations of it—and pragmatically, through author-publisher agreements to circumvent the lack of transnational copyright or through market-driven self-censorship for different audiences. Until now, scholarship has struggled to find a single dynamic from which to consider the Anglo-American transatlantic cultural field, and transnational fields more generally. This volume offers that single dynamic through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that brings together the research areas of literary and transnational studies with economic history. It shows how the positional national identities constructed by nineteenth-century texts were informed by economic self-interest in the emergent global marketplace. Through a series of case studies the book analyses how contemporary economic innovations determined nineteenth-century concepts of national and cultural self-identification. Presented within four main body chapters, each considers two case studies of nineteenth-century authors that are in productive contrast, including pairings between Herman Melville and Washington Irving, E.D.E.N. Southworth and Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and finally Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.

American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853

Author: Meredith L. McGill

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0812209745

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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.

Talking Shop
Talking Shop

Author: Peter J. Betjemann

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0813931215

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Discussing a wide range of material from fiction and essays to artifacts, the book explores how the era paved the way for the vitality and the viability of a language of craft in much later decades.