The Business of Letters
Authorial Economies in Antebellum America
Leon Jackson
Traditionally, scholars of authorship in antebellum America hav approached their subject through the lens of professionalization exploring the ways in which writing moved away from amateuris 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.
"Leon Jackson's clear-headed and rich analysis of the complex cultural and economic behaviors that constituted authorship in the decades prior to the Civil War compellingly redirects current discussions of American literary authorship and will have a significant impact on a large and growing body of scholarship."—Jeffrey Groves, Harvey Mudd College
"The Business of Letters offers a compelling prospect on the American literary landscape from independence to the Civil War. With a capacious view of authors, editors, and readers in a changing social and economic setting, this work is the most theoretically sophisticated and historically informed that I have read in years."—Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut, Storrs
Leon Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
2007344 pp.
ISBN-10: 0804757054
ISBN-13: 9780804757058
Cloth $60.00
The Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Edited by Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni
The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its importan implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectua context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovere perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated an explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, an society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—mos dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critica reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectua rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations fo modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this boo present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, an suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, an bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to b fundamentally anthropological
Larry Wolff is Professor of History at New York University. His books include Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), and Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2001).
Marco Cipolloni is Professor and Chair of Spanish Language and Culture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His works include Il sovrano e la corte nelle "cartas" della Conquista(1991), Tra memoria apostolica e racconto profetico: Il compromesso etnografico francescano e le "cosas" della Nuova Spagna, (1994), and the critical edition of the Teatro completo of Miguel Angel Asturias (2003).
432 pp.
0804752028 cloth ($70.00)
0804752036 paper ($29.95)
Puritan Conquistadors
Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
This book argues that the striking resemblances in Spanish and Purita discourses of colonization as “exorcism” and as spiritual gardening point t a common Atlantic history. These resemblances suggest that we are bette off if we simply consider the Puritan colonization of New England as continuation of Iberian models rather than a radically different colonizin experience. The book demonstrates that a wider Pan-American perspectiv can upset the most cherished national narratives of the United States, for i maintains that the Puritan colonization of New England was as much chivalric, crusading act of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of the award winning How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford University Press, 2001).
October 2006344 pp., 55 illustrations.
0804742790 cloth ($60.00)
0804742804 paper ($24.95)
Underwriting
The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872
Eric Wertheimer
This book focuses on the way literary texts articulate embedded cultura assumptions about monetary value and reflect the logic of certain economi practices. In its simplest formulation, Underwriting is an investigation of the cultural history of insurance in early America. It seeks a large part of that cultural history in the lives and works of five American authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Noah Webster, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It hinges on an odd-sounding assumption: that insurance, as a textual procedure requiring signatures to conserve property, is a writing business, theoretically and practically. Insurance articulates a nexus (in the form of contractual and monetary obligations) between property and text, attempting to mark and reconcile with its voracious application of assurances these two cornerstones of capitalist logic. The plot of Underwriting that Wertheimer pursues is then manifold: a meditation on theories of writing; a cultural and social history of the practices that make mutually defining modes of loss and reparation profitable and pleasurable; and a reading of certain literary texts that might lead us to new understandings of the relationship between artistic and commercial discourses in America.
Eric Wertheimer is Associate Professor of American Literature at Arizona State University. He is also the author of Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876 (1998).
2006208 pp., 7 figures.
Cloth ISBN: 08047–5089–0 $50.00
May 13, 2008