American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 by Meredith L. McGill (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 769 earlier chapter to 'production and the shop floor' (pp. 38-42) and 'distributing and marketing texts' (pp. 42-46) is not repeated in the chapter on the later period. Chap? ter 2 concludes with the statement that 'the labor strikes of 1872-73 resulted in a de-unionizing policy that was to remain in place until the turn ofthe century', but at least something should have been said about labour and labour relations in the period 1880-1912, especially as this area has already been acknowledged as 'one of the least explored in publishing histories' (p. 38). Finkelstein is one of the editors of the recent Book History Reader (London: Rout? ledge, 2002) and Chapter 1 of The House ofBlackwooddraws upon a number ofthe theorists present in that important collection, including Darnton, Bourdieu, and Janice Radway, and this and the following chapter rely heavily on Radway's idea, developed in her work on the US Book-of-the-Month Club, that different 'layers, levels and planes of literary production' coexist within institutions (such as publishing houses) which manage them in an 'unhierarchized fashion' (p. 19). Finkelstein uses Radway to justify the fact that he pays equal attention to the author-publisher relations that existed between authors involved in both literary and 'nonliterary' (p. 36) projects; and the chapters on the ghosting of Speke's Discovery ofthe Source ofthe Nile and the serialization of Reade's A Woman Hater in Blackwood's Magazine are among the best here. Both demonstrate how important author-publisher relations could be in shaping the final text, but they appear curiously under-theorized in relation to the chapters that precede them, perhaps because they have appeared elsewhere in similar form. Despite these limitations, this is an important book, which by extending the remit of the house history to include much more than just the author-publisher relations of its subtitle suggests a number of ways in which book historians can challenge and revise the 'official' history of the print culture of the Victorian era. University of Reading Stephen Colclough American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. By Meredith L. McGill. (Material Texts) Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press. 2002. viii + 364pp. $39.95; ?28. ISBN 0-8122-3698-x. In American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853, Meredith McGill takes aim at Michael T. Gilmore's close alignment, in his American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), of capitalist de? velopment with the emergence of professional writing (p. 12). Rather, for her, 'the discourse of authorship develops not congruently, but at odds with changes in the conditions of production' (p. 49). Closely analysing the landmark case of Wheaton v. Peters (1834), she argues foran American exception to the British instance described in Mark Rose's Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). According to her, the American con? ception of copyright rejected the British Lockean basis of 'natural' personal property rights in favour of a public imperative based on readers' relation to texts as a kind of production (p. 62), within what she describes as a Jacksonian 'decentralization of power' (p. 108). As manuscripts moved into the publicity of print, they rather lost than gained private protection. Yet despite this keen recognition of the power of writing beyond the scope of print, McGill does not consider manuscript publication, so well treated for early modern Britain by Harold Love (Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993)) and Margaret J. M. Ezell (Social Author? ship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)). This scholarship, after all, suggests more similarity between British and American 77? Reviews practice, even granted a transatlantic lag, than McGill's narrow analysis of legal discourse reveals. Moreover, exclusive focus upon printing distorts the overall pic? ture of the literary field, in so far as it severs everyday scribal production practices away from print. The introduction of this into McGill's argument, however, would undermine her Habermasian conflation of printing with the putative public sphere (after Michael Warner) and thus her juridico-politico (read: Republican) correction...