YES,3I, 200o YES,3I, 200o 309 309 penetrating.He wants to turnourview of the growthof the professionof authorship in America upside-down. I do not think he succeeds, for the reasons I have given above, but for anyone with an interest in the place of the writerin early American literaturethis is requiredreading. UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY HENRY CLARIDGE FiguringAuthorshipin AntebellumAmerica. By MICHAELNEWBURY. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1997. ix + 251 pp. C27.95; $39.50. Michael Newbury's book is an intervention in the study of nineteenth-century American authorship, the changes in publication practices, and corresponding changes in how the professionof writingwas conceptualized and practised.In some ways, this interesting topic was opened up by William Charvat's 1968 book The Profession ofAuthorship in America, I800-I870, which laid out the basic facts: a new mass reading public, inexpensive, high-speed printing, refinements in marketing and distribution,and strongercopyrightlaws.Laterwritershave examined the ways in which these developments affected the roles that authors played in American culture. Ann Douglas, Cathy Davidson, Nina Baym, and Laurence Buell, among others, have documented, with various emphases, the shifts from amateurism to professionalism and from moral instruction to entertainment, as well as such phenomena as the rise of the mass-marketpopular novel and the heavily gendered division of literature into the male 'romantic' and the female 'sentimental' or 'domestic'. Newbury buildsupon this earlierwork,but reordersit by shiftingits categoriesof analysis. Arguing that previous treatments of nineteenth-century authorship have presented a partial picture by using paradigms of genre, gender, and affiliations with various philosophical or intellectual movements, he proposes to replace them with rhetoricalparadigmsof work. 'Each of these [earlier]means of organization', he writes, 'tends to ignore that writing is one form of work among many, that authorshiprequiresdefinition not only intrinsicallyor absolutely,but conditionally and relatively- as one part of a largerdiscursiveunderstandingof labor and economics' (p. 4). Newbury therefore studies how antebellum American authors 'figured' authorship, that is, represented it by mediating it through such other forms of labour as industrial work, slavery, white-collar work, and craft production. Newbury characterizes his work as 'materialist', 'committed to discourse analysis', and 'radically individualist' (p. 9). The individualism appears in his recognition that, while authors frequently drew on the categories of labour to define their work, they did so in highly individualized ways. One of the strengths of the book is its demonstration of the variety of ways that writers positioned themselves within the categories of labour. In Chapter I, Newbury examines the ways that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and the contributors to 'The Lowell Offering' positioned their work in relation to industrial labour. He finds that Hawthorne and Melville both tried to cast women's sentimental or domestic writing as 'factory work' (most notably in Hawthorne's notorious remark about 'the d-d mob of scribbling women'), while insisting on their own work as individuated and expressive ('craft'). The writers of the 'Lowell Offering', actual factory girls in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, appealed quite differently to the industrial model, contrasting their writing to the lockstep tedium of factory work. Chapter 2, through readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter,and Harriet Jacobs's Incidentsin theLife of a SlaveGirl,finds a figural link (that Newbury himself finds 'unexpected' (p. 84)) between authorial celebrity and slave penetrating.He wants to turnourview of the growthof the professionof authorship in America upside-down. I do not think he succeeds, for the reasons I have given above, but for anyone with an interest in the place of the writerin early American literaturethis is requiredreading. UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY HENRY CLARIDGE FiguringAuthorshipin AntebellumAmerica. By MICHAELNEWBURY. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1997. ix + 251 pp. C27.95; $39.50. Michael Newbury's book is an intervention in the study of nineteenth-century American authorship, the changes in publication practices, and corresponding changes in how the professionof writingwas conceptualized and practised.In some ways, this interesting topic was opened up by William Charvat's 1968 book The Profession ofAuthorship in America, I800-I870, which laid out the basic facts: a new mass reading public, inexpensive, high-speed printing, refinements in marketing and...