McGill 2013

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)

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."
  • clear connection to St Clair 2004
• 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)
  • tie to Turner 2010, Beetham 1990
• 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."
  • collecting practices - Knight 2013
• 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)