The grand chorus of complaint: authors and the business ethics of american publishing

An engaging study of authorship, ethics, and book publishing in 18th- and 19th-century America, The Grand Chorus of Complaint considers the uneasy relationship between art and commerce with readings of correspondence, newspaper articles, and works by Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, and Fanny Fern. When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for executing a bookseller, and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition--calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called "the conflict of the ages," the feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted.The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a study of the terms of that feud in early America. Ranging from the Revolution to the Civil War, Michael Everton exploresmoral propriety in American literary culture, arguing that debates over the business of authorship and publishing in the first century of the UnitedStates were simultaneously debates over the ethics and character of capitalism.The Grand Chorus of Complaint shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from the "real"issues affecting American literary culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. Drawing on a diverse archive, Everton argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercialworld preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. This study illustrates that ethics should matter as much to literary and book historians as much as it has come to matter--again--to literary critics and theorists. Richly explores how this vision of culture and commerce worked its way into the business of print between the end of the American Revolution in 1776 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. Everton's close reading of the language of complaint in his many fascinating case studies illuminates the precise nature of the author-publisher relationship. INDICE: Introduction Chapter 1 - The Character of the Trade Chapter 2 - Liberty in Business: The Printing of Common Sense Chapter 3 - Hannah Adams and the Courtesies of Authorship Chapter 4 - The Moral Vernacular of American Copyright Reform Chapter 5 - Melville in the Antebellum Publishing Maelstrom Chapter 6 - The Tact of Ruthless Hall Epilogue - What Lies Back of the Contract Index

• ISBN: 978-0-19-975178-5
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 256
• Fecha Publicación: 07/07/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés