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Melville and the Marketplace

Sheila Post

in A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

Although it is evident that Herman Melville and a number of other contemporary writers incorporated in their works the evident trends in the mid-nineteenth-century literary marketplace, it can be ... More

Although it is evident that Herman Melville and a number of other contemporary writers incorporated in their works the evident trends in the mid-nineteenth-century literary marketplace, it can be observed that this period could be attributed to a collection of marketplace conditions that appeared to be rather uncommon. Unlike the relatively affluent writers who wrote mainly for leisure, other American authors who wrote for profit had to have their works published first in England to avoid the risk of having their works pirated by publishers in Europe. With this, American writers were tasked to suit their writings to both American and British tastes, since the British focused more on socioeconomic issues while Americans had to accommodate varied readerships across the middle class and debates regarding style and genre.Less

Biography and the Romantic Poet

Julian North

in The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet

This chapter looks at the encounter between biography and the Romantic poet. It focuses on the hostile responses to the genre from Coleridge (‘A Prefatory Observation on Modern Biography’ (1810) ) ... More

This chapter looks at the encounter between biography and the Romantic poet. It focuses on the hostile responses to the genre from Coleridge (‘A Prefatory Observation on Modern Biography’ (1810) ) and Wordsworth (‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ (1810) and A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816) ), in the context of what Lucy Newlyn has called their ‘anxiety of reception’. It explores the competition between poetry and biography in the literary marketplace between 1820 and 1840, and looks atways in which biography was celebrated by Hazlitt, Carlyle, and others at the period, as a democratizing form, with the capacity to create a uniquely intimate relationship between reader and subject.Less

Conclusion: ‘The Antidote to these Women's Poison’?

Paula McDowell

in The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730

Offering a new synthetic model for the study of the literary marketplace, this book has uncovered a legacy of female religio-political activity that existed long before the better-known political ... More

Offering a new synthetic model for the study of the literary marketplace, this book has uncovered a legacy of female religio-political activity that existed long before the better-known political activity of women in the 1790s. For the women printworkers and propagandists studied here, access to the press was a vehicle of significant if limited power. Their involvement in political culture, while little known today, was considered dangerous enough in their own time to necessitate their arrest. To understand the lives of persons across a broad class and ideological spectrum, this book has argued, we need to take greater risks to develop new methodologies. We get a different view of the chief concerns and voices of the age when we consider all aspects of textual producation and dissemination and include forms like broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers than when we concentrate exclusively on authorship and on relatively decorous forms like the novel.Less

Besant and Collaboration

Kirsty Bunting

in Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

At the heart of this chapter is the assertion that it is impossible to understand the full complexity of the nineteenth-century literary tradition without acknowledging that as the result of the ... More

At the heart of this chapter is the assertion that it is impossible to understand the full complexity of the nineteenth-century literary tradition without acknowledging that as the result of the expansion of the marketplace and the proliferation of collaborative modes of writing, the mid-to-late nineteenth century underwent a re-evaluation of the inherited Romantic constructs of authorship. It examines Walter Besant’s role as a central figure in this re-evaluation through his extended examinations of, and experiments with, collaborative authority, and the status of the author in general. This chapter discusses Walter Besant’s treatments of the topic of literary collaboration with close reference to his public commentary in the press and in his life-writing which expose and examine cultural—and some of Besant’s own—anxieties circulating at the fin de siècle about the perceived negative and disruptive effects of reading collaboratively written works. This chapter unpacks Besant’s ‘spousal’ collaborative model and situates Besant’s attitudes to literary collaboration against its marketplace contexts generally, examining how they compare with other contemporaneous literary and journalistic commentators’ treatments of shared writing across genres.Less

Introduction

Paula McDowell

in The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730

Part I surveys the politically dissident activities of women in the book trade, discussing women printers, publishers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and others. In this period between the decline of ... More

Part I surveys the politically dissident activities of women in the book trade, discussing women printers, publishers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and others. In this period between the decline of effective press regulations in the mid-seventeenth century and the consolidation of commercial controls and capital in the mid-eighteenth century, women workers seized the opportunity to support themselves by means of a newly energized press they helped create. While providing information regarding women's commercial dealings and institutional status, the primary task of Part I is to investigate print as a new mode of association for women and as a vehicle for their political expression. On the basis of examination of fifty years of State Papers pertaining to press prosecutions, this section argues that women printworkers, sometimes themselves illiterate, played a significant role in the production and dissemination of political literature, and that they were not merely the distributors of other people's political ideas.Less

Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act

Sarah Zimmerman

in The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Coleridge set some of the key terms of Romantic-era literary lecturing in his responses to two historical pressures. He attempted to define himself as a literary lecturer against his former roles as ... More

Coleridge set some of the key terms of Romantic-era literary lecturing in his responses to two historical pressures. He attempted to define himself as a literary lecturer against his former roles as a political speaker and Dissenting preacher. He also tried to distance himself from the pressures of the literary marketplace. He developed his key concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” partly from a desire to persuade auditors to see him not as a paid performer, but rather as a “Poet-philosopher.” Some of his best-known critical arguments gain new meaning once they are understood as in part responses to the culture for which they were pitched. These include his readings of the character of Hamlet and the relationship of Romeo and Juliet.Less

Approaching the Lecture Room

Sarah Zimmerman

in The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Public lectures on poetry became popular events in England in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. They joined a thriving lecture scene dominated by science lectures, and they were ... More

Public lectures on poetry became popular events in England in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. They joined a thriving lecture scene dominated by science lectures, and they were indebted to traditions of lecturing on elocution and on rhetoric and belles lettres. The public lecture is a crucial medium for the development of the modern category of “literature” because it highlights its debts to these traditions. The literary lecture was also crucially informed by the radical speaking cultures of the 1790s, and it thrived in anxious proximity to a burgeoning literary marketplace. New scholarly attention to the public lecture on literature has been sponsored by research in a number of disciplines, and critical approaches to the medium have been developed in an interdisciplinary conversation about how to treat historical speaking performances.Less

Novelty and the Market: Edith Wharton

Vike Martina Plock

in Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

This chapter discusses Edith Wharton’s critical assessment of modern consumer culture, whose ascendancy she associated with standardised sartorial and literary tastes. By showing her indebtedness to ... More

This chapter discusses Edith Wharton’s critical assessment of modern consumer culture, whose ascendancy she associated with standardised sartorial and literary tastes. By showing her indebtedness to Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories, it argues that she was suspicious of fashion’s imperative for ‘newness’ and thought that its cultural dominance was detrimental to cultural and artistic progress. Alongside essays such as ‘The Vice of Reading’, ‘The Great American Novel’, ‘Permanent Values in Fiction’, and ‘Fiction and Criticism’ as well as unpublished material from the Edith Wharton Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the chapter focuses on novels such as The Touchstone (1900), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932).Less

The ‘business’ of a woman's life and the making of the Female Philosopher: the works of Mary Wollstonecraft

Jennie Batchelor

in Women's Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830

This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of ... More

This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of one of the most vocal and eloquent commentators on this issue, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her extensive, but by no means internally consistent, reflections upon the labour and literary marketplaces signal crucial, and in many ways decisive, developments in the narratives about work and authorship that this book examines. Most particularly, an investigation of her polemical writings, philosophical works, travel literature and novels suggests that the more labour was prized in late eighteenth-century writings on political economy, and the more centrally its language figured in the republic of letters' self-presentation at the century's close, the more vital and the more difficult it became for women writers to press the discourse of labour into the service of their gender and textual politics.Less

Publishing Woman

in Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism

This chapter pays attention to men's endeavors to support women as they entered the professions, with a specific emphasis on the literary marketplace. The life stories of most late-eighteenth-century ... More

This chapter pays attention to men's endeavors to support women as they entered the professions, with a specific emphasis on the literary marketplace. The life stories of most late-eighteenth-century female authors are addressed. Joseph Johnson interacted with aspiring female authors. It was his financial and intellectual support of Mary Wollstonecraft that most distinguished him as a “champion of the fair sex.” The London-based bookseller William Lane intended on promoting women's fledgling careers. As with Johnson in the bookselling scene, William Enfield and Alexander Geddes were not alone in their enthusiasm for promoting women writers, although they were certainly the most consistently supportive. Others include William Taylor, Thomas Gisborne, Thomas Cooper, Erasmus Darwin, George Dyer, William Godwin, William Hayley, and Hugh Worthington.Less

“An Independent Publication for Geologists”: The Geological Society, Commercial Journals, and the Remaking of Nineteenth-Century Geology

Gowan Dawson

in Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities

The Geological Society of London’s elitism ensured that it remained at odds with commercial journals that sought to foster different, more marketable approaches to the earth sciences. The financial ... More

The Geological Society of London’s elitism ensured that it remained at odds with commercial journals that sought to foster different, more marketable approaches to the earth sciences. The financial imperatives of the literary marketplace necessitated that these journals endeavored to cultivate a much larger readership than the Geological Society’s official publications, which addressed only the needs of gentlemanly specialists. The pecuniary difficulties imposed by a limited circulation nevertheless had significant implications for the intellectual and scientific value of the Geological Society’s periodicals. At the same time, commercial journals, whose continued existence required a broader audience, utilized the potential of new communities of geologists to forge a less exclusive and more egalitarian conception of the earth sciences, directly challenging the Geological Society’s hierarchical exclusivity. Significantly, the gentlemanly specialists would eventually feel compelled to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the more inclusive approach of these journals. The format of the most populist of these commercial periodicals, the Geologist, would, by the end of the nineteenth century, provide the vehicle for a new community of professional geologists to finally supplant, with the Geological Magazine, the intellectual authority of the Geological Society and its gentlemanly specialists.Less

Introduction

Vike Martina Plock

in Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It ... More

The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.Less

Exploration and Narrative: Travel, Writing, Publishing, and the House of Murray

Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell

in Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859

The heightened presence from the later eighteenth century of travel publishing as a distinctive genre was coincident with the emergence of greater literacy in Britain, the development of a literary ... More

The heightened presence from the later eighteenth century of travel publishing as a distinctive genre was coincident with the emergence of greater literacy in Britain, the development of a literary marketplace, and a recognition by publishers of the need to develop a clear strategy with respect to the publication of travel and exploration. The house of Murray at first moved only slowly in publishing accounts of overseas travel and exploration, many of its works before 1800 being co-published with other London firms. Its first ventures in this respect—in 1773 with Sydney Parkinson’s narrative, and in 1782 with a book of Indian travels by William Macintosh—are examined for what they reveal about the key issues of authorial credibility, truth in the narrative’s content, and style in the language. After 1815, as opportunities for overseas exploration opened up, and under the direction of John Murray II, with the assistance of John Barrow, Second Secretary to the British Admiralty, the house of Murray developed a clear focus on the quality of its publications in this field. This was continued and developed under John Murray III. The evolution of the explorer-author took place in association with the evolution of the Murray firm.Less

The Literary Marketplace and Rebellions against Commerce

Katherine Mullin

in Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity

Chapter 4 explores how fictions by Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, George Gissing, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf share their culture’s preoccupation with the unresolved ... More

Chapter 4 explores how fictions by Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, George Gissing, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf share their culture’s preoccupation with the unresolved question of the shop-girl’s agency. It traces the late nineteenth-century vogue for shop-girl fiction to Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames, which was understood in the British literary press as one of the first examples of naturalism, and fictional responses to it made the shop-girl central to plots of formal innovation. However, writers played a risky game, since shop-girls were associated not only with self-commodification, but with cultural debasement. ‘Shop-girl fiction’ was an established synonym for undemanding popular romances. In taking up this fashionable but ‘low’ protagonist, naturalist and modernist writers tested cultural hierarchies. They also used their heroines’ ambiguous agency to express unease about the pressing financial imperatives of literary culture. Like telegraphists and typists, shop-girls become figures for the covert release of authorial anxieties.Less