Antebellum Authorship and the Common Property of American Literature

Abstract

and monolithic characterizations of the “market revolution” that recently have dominated our picture of antebellum America. By exploring the problem of a book’s value at their center, McGill uses the debates over copyright as a case study of how the very concept of the “market” took shape 363 AUGST / Antebellum Authorship at a pivotal moment in the evolution of federal power in the United States: “at stake in the struggle over international copyright is not simply authors’ and publishers’ profits, or the nature of intellectual property, but the place of print in market culture at a moment when the shape and fate of markets was anything but assured” (p. 85). If, as McGill persuasively demonstrates, copyright was another battleground in a protracted war between Republican and liberal ideologies, then “the circulation of print raised questions about the compatibility of democracy and market revolution” (p. 86). Reviving the creative and vigorous arguments of opponents of international copyright, McGill allows us to understand how, at least throughout the antebellum period, the logic of market expansion was contested by an avowedly political vision of the instruments and artifacts of the print medium—where the consolidation of capital and the supposedly natural right to private property would be offset by the widest ownership of texts, where “the mass produced book would be an exception to the rules of market exchange” (p. 63). For literary critics, McGill offers an especially useful analysis of the “strong half-life of the Republican understanding of print as public property” (p. 14). By framing this study around legal and congressional debates about the economic status and cultural significance of literary property, McGill suggests how we might rethink the study of American literature once contemporary scholars set aside their own ideological, and anachronistic, attachment to the development of a national literature and the suppositions about the unity and coherence of an author’s work on which it depends. It is remarkable that, given the extraordinary revision of the literary canon that has taken place over the last thirty years, the methods and concepts we use to study texts from the past have remained relatively oblivious to the actual conditions of reading, writing, and publishing from which they emerged. Not unlike the historical profession’s preoccupation with Great Men prior to the advent of social and cultural history, the discipline of literary studies is poised finally to break with its own outworn values and methods. McGill’s work and other innovative scholarship in the history of the book have opened up new opportunities for us to rewrite the history of literature, indeed literacy and culture more generally, from the bottom up—to reckon with everyday practices and objects from the old media that are every bit as revolutionary and mundane as those that now bind us to the new. Thomas Augst, associate professor of English, University of Minnesota, is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), and is writing a new book about mass culture and political change, The Sobriety Test: Temperance and the Melodramas of Modern Citizenship. REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2004 364 1. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979). For influential early works in the American history of the book in literary criticism, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: oPublication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. (1990). For recent work on the history of reading, authorship and publishing in nineteenth-century America, see Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993); David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999); Scott Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1999); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival On the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (2000); Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002); and Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003).