McGill 2013

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Meredith McGill. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2013. Web.

  • focus on Intro, Dickens ch (3), Poe ch (4)
  • all about distribution and how that affects notions of authorship and the "materiality of rhetorical structures"

Intro

  • 1 "dynamic relationship between conceptions of literary property and American cultural production" in 1830s-40s when "legal and political resistance to tight controls over intellectual property produced a literary marketplace suffused with unauthorized publications."
  • argument: ...antebellum ideas about intellectual property helped to produce a distinctive literary culture that cannot adequately be perceived through the optices of national literary study, a paradigm that we have all but naturalized. Although we have come to think of the classic works of mid C19 American authors as national property, these texts emerged from a literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope.
    • no true center to antebellum print culture - Philadelphia, New York and Boston all competed and had regional editions of cheap, reprinted British books unconstrained by copyright
  • 2 Circulation outstripped authorial and editorial control.
  • mutual dependence of periodicals and books, books printed as magazine "extras" in 1830s (though in America brought about by economic depression, I'm unclear on the economic circumstances in Britain in that decade)
  • 2-3 Great paragraph about the omissions she's intervening in, esp, "Unauthorized reprinting escapes the enumerative strategies of bibliographers and collectors who remain tied to authorial intention and the principle of scarcity as grounds of value."
  • focus authors: Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne
  • 3 "reprinting" is the appropriate word here vs "piracy": "republication of foreign works and certain kinds of domestic texts was perfectly legal"
  • 4 Taking reprinting as my point of entry into antebellum culture enables me to reach back through the foundational anxieties of literary nationalism to uncover a literature defined by its exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination.
  • 5 ...reprinting is a remarkably promising subject for book historians. Reprinting is a form of textual production that is inseparable from distribution and reception.
  • methodological difference: Book historians' commitment to documenting the material processes of publication and reception and their interest in the social locations of culture have often rendered the rhetorical analysis of texts of secondary importance.
    • also recent lit crit has had little use for the book
    • 7 And while I am concerned to read the materiality of reprinted texts as fully rhetorical, I regard rhetorical structures as no less material than publication processes. This book takes as its subject the problematic property status of printed texts, but it will not center on the book-as-object. That is to say, this is not a study of reprints themselves but of the ways in which the system of reprinting recasts the reading and writing of poetry and fiction.... My focus, then, will be on the rhetorical origins and interpretive consequences of the material practices of reprinting.
  • 9 how the copyright page shows the intellectual culture regime of public property "outruns the control of authors"
  • 11 Clearly grounded in statutory law and not common law or natural right, copyright threatens to expose by analogy the artificial and state-mediated nature of all property.
  • 14 pushing against the "nationalist framework of most Americanist literary criticism and book history" (see p 1)
  • 15 A focus on reprinting can help to integrate literary study with historians' representation of the market system as politically contested by training our gaze on readers' modes of access to literary culture.
  • 17 ...I do not eschew authorship as a point of entry into the culture of reprinting. I am not convinced that it is possible or desirable for literary criticism to do without authors.... After all, in rejecting authorship as a governing principle for the production and distribution of literary texts, the culture of reprinting does not eliminate authors so much as suspend, reconfigure, and intensify their authority, placing a premium on texts that circulate with the names of authors attached.... Even authorized editions, with their engraved portrait frontispieices, prefatory statements, and florid authorial signatures, owe their development in this period to the everyday circulation of unauthorized reprints.
    • Puts me in mind of Piper 2009 on monumental authorized editions
    • "I try to avoid presuming that an author unifies or is unified by his published work."
  • 21-3 complex national and international politics of newspaper masthead that reprints Dickens's "American Notes": national expression of democratic principles through colonial dependency (that also defies Britain's IP regime)
  • 26 eclectic magazine "repeats and reconfigures the effacement of the author's name, reassigning what Foucault called the 'author-function' to the periodical of origin"
  • 29 Gift books were "technologically and commercially cutting-edge products. Gift books were one of the first mass-produced luxury commodities, designed to overcome the uncertain and intermittent demand for books by appearing annually, in time to be purchased and given away for Christmas."
    • l/u Stephen Nissenbaum on gift books
  • 39 The three reprint formats I have surveyed -- newspaper extras, eclectic magazines, and gift books and illustrated magazines -- all demonstrate the importance of distribution to the organization of culture of reprinting. The emphasis of reprinters on getting books and periodicals to new groups of readers shifts the locus of value from textual origination to editing and arrangement, placing authorship under complex forms of occlusion. In reprint culture, authorship is not the dominant mode of organizing literary culture; texts with authors' names attached take their place alongside anonymous, pseudonymous, and unauthorized texts.
    • an opportunity, with authorship in question, to reexamine this print culture in terms of race and gender, gender because women authors were empowered by the gift book structure, and race since African-American authors were able to distribute their writing precisely because of the suspension of authorial identity (40-1)

Ch 3 Dickens, Reprinting, and the Dislocation of American Culture

  • 109: ...what from the perspective of an author-centered literary culture looks like an unconscionable violation of authors' rights was understood in the antebellum period as a struggle between competing visions of a rapidly expanding marketplace.
    • publishers resisting "universal application of the principle of authors' rights" to maintain "decentralization across the market for printed goods"
  • 110 print culture tied to republicanism and questions about federalism: "Antebellum debates over print culture, like those concerning internal improvements and the national bank, were driven by the need for means and modes of circulation that could resist being coopted by central power."
  • The culture of reprinting was so alien to Dickens that he had difficulty comprehending why his vocal support for international copyright posed a serious threat to his literary reception.
  • In his American narratives, Dickens explicitly linked a depraved indifference to slavery to the licentiousness of the American press.
  • 111 Dickens and the "dangers of uncontrolled circulation" -- could be seen also in metaphorical ways in Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861) and Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)
  • 112 a priori to Dickens even arriving, his "already thorough penetration of American culture and consciousness" due to the system of reprinting that was based on a lack of international copyright (113)
  • 113 Dickens's aristocratic use of gentlemanly anonymity [in letters to American newspapers supporting int'l copyright] to conceal networks of trade is met by a democratic notion of authorship as subjection to circulation - the American press's insistence that authors are and should be a kind of common property.
  • 114 D's complaint in a letter to his brother-in-law: "Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled, an author should be forced to appear in any form -- in any vulgar dress -- in any atrocious company -- that he should have no choice of audience -- no controul [sic] over his own distorted text?"
    • this could be related to bodies/periodicals
  • 116 Dickens's detailed description of his physical discomfort in overcrowded public spaces...can be read as comic elaborations of his more troubling experience of popular print culture as uncontrolled proximity to the vulgar.
  • 117-18 [pushing against A Welsh's seeing Martin Chuzzlewit as a space of mastery of his American experience] ...The more we value D's tour, his narrative, and his novel as catalysts for or evidence of authorial metamorphosis, the more distant D's crisis of authorial agency becomes. Translating the unsettling experience of cultural difference into moral fable and D's texts into allegories of authorship, we lose the ability to see how they register aspects of American culture that D cannot master.
  • 119 [American newspaper distributing American Notes] ...the New World accused supporters of international copyright of trying to annex the American marekt to the British market, "creating an expense here which the British legislators refused to create even for a future generation"
    • this when the short copyright period was closed in the early 1840s but not extended that far, see St Clair 2004
  • 123 American Notes' "narrative disorderliness," its decentralization (which she links to Jacksonian democracy): rather than focusing on destinations "American Notes pays extraordinarily clsoe attention to transportation, not only registering Dickens's revlusion at the forms of publicity that were enforced by American means of conveyance, but repeatedly inscribing the awkwardness of the transition from rail to road, to ferry, to steamer, to horse cart, to canal boat, to another steamboat, and another, and so forth."
  • 125 In its evocation of the replication of culture without governing intention [in the figure of repetitive landscapes], Dickens's account of his travels recalls the difficulty of figuring authorial agency and establishing responsibility for the circulation of texts in the culture of repeating.
  • 126 His moral certainty of its [slavery's] depravity helps to stabilize his narrative perspective, enabling him to read the landscape allegorically.
  • 128 The inscriptive violence Dickens records [in quoting newspaper descriptions of escaped slaves and their injuries], then, is very much his own signature, reflecting not only slave-owners' attempts to mark and to control the bodies of their slaves, but also Dickens's attempt to exercise his own authority over a disturbingly elusive subject, his struggle to establish national responsibility for slavery from a proliferation of local instances.
  • 134 The most important revision of the tour and narrative [in Chuzzlewit], however, is Dickens's discovery of London as a formal solution to the problem of national representation.... [135] It is the city itself that makes possible the connections between strangers that Nadgett will painstakingly trace. The city is an intricate maze that nevertheless allows for an unconscious simultaneity, a sharing of common space and common thoughts that can only be perceived by novelist and reader.
    • one might see this as developing in Bleak House (1853) in a negative fashion: a solution to national representation that highlights societal ills
  • 135 Both Forster and Dickens imagine London as the synecdoche for a social order that enforces moral distinctions despite the violations of public trust perpetrated by scurrilous newspapers and moralizing Pecksniffs. By contrast, American publishers imagine that reprint culture can ameliorate social inequality by holding potentially divisive differences in a kind of solution.
  • 137 reading ads for different formats of Dickens's works in a late 1850s ed of American Notes: "Despite the proliferation of editions and elaborate binding styles, this is a publishing venture that attempts both to meet and to produce a desire for inclusiveness: "No library, either public or private, can be complete without having in it a complete set of the works of this, the greatest of all living authors.""
    • T.B. Peterson's "Thirteen Different Editions in Octavo Form" demonstrate how easily Dickens's popularly accessible mode of literary authority and his interest in the new republic could be absorbed into the [138] domestic project of imagining the forms of and barriers to national coherence. Not despite of but because of their mutual misprision, a rich field of significance comes to occupy the space between Dickens and his American readers.
  • 139 the way his later reading tour in 1867-8 locates authorship in the performance of the work rather than as an external guarantor of authority
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