The Business of Letters Authorial Economies in Antebellum America [Hardcover]

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 Lettersbreaks 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 competitioneach 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.The Business of Lettersis a broad-ranging study of authorial economics in antebellum America that describes writers' exchange practices as profoundly rooted in, and constitutive of, social bonds. I have no question but that Jackson has written a fine book, one that recovers for readers in the twenty-first century the varied rewards for writers in the nineteenth century. He is a superb and patient researcher with a particular sensitivity to the social context of literary achievement. The Business of Letters is a work of impressive emulation, well warranting scholarly approbation. Leon Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Jackson's monograph is by turns imaginative, thoroughly researched, and deftly realized. The Business of Lettersoffers a compelló+