The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America

Traditionally, scholars of authorship in antebellum America have approached their subject through the lens of professionalization, exploring the ways in which writing moved away from amateurism and into the capitalist marketplace. The Business of Letters breaks new ground by challenging the dominant professionalization model, with its vision of a single literary marketplace. Leon Jackson shows how antebellum authors participated in a variety of different economies including patronage, charity, gift exchange, and competition--each of which had its own rules and reciprocities, its own ethics and exchange rituals, and sometimes even its own currencies. Examining a variety of canonical and non-canonical authors, including women, slaves, and artisans, and drawing on theoretical approaches from anthropology, sociology, social history, and literary criticism, Jackson reveals authors to have been social agents whose acts of authorial exchange involved them in dense webs of community. The decisive transformation of the antebellum period, he concludes, was not from amateurism to professionalism, but, rather, from socially embedded exchange to impersonally conducted business.

Author: Leon Jackson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 11/29/2007
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.33lbs
Size: 9.05h x 6.34w x 0.96d
ISBN: 9780804757058

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2008 pg. 343

About the Author
Leon Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.