Abstract
At one point in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1949), narrator Holden Caulfïeld fixes his standard for judging literary quality. A novel passes his test if, upon finish reading it, he is overcome with the urge to have an intimate conversation with the author. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” the disaffected youth says, sadly realizing that this “doesn’t happen much, though.”1 Professional authors, Holden laments, are rarely accessible on such a personal level given the highly mediated modern literary marketplace, and its careful packaging of writers into brand names and their works into literary products.2 Even if Holden had broken through his paralyzing self-consciousness to “call old Thomas Hardy up” (although the author had already been dead for twenty years), the gauze of fame and commercial culture’s rituals of isolated consumption would have conspired to separate these like-minded literary souls from one another.3
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Notes
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown, 1951), 18.
John S. Hart, The Female Prose Writers of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writings (Philadelphia: E.H. Butler, 1852), 7.
Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 6.
For an interesting early study of Transcendentalism’s connection to Marxism, see David Herreshoff, American Disciples of Marx: From the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 11–52. Imaginative socialistic alternatives to free market enterprise should be understood in the context of how “Anti-capitalism has been a part of middle-class ideology ever since the mid-eighteenth century. The critique of modernization expressed itself in Rousseau, Adam Ferguson, the early Goethe, Herder, the Romantics, and others, as a critique of greed, self-interest, and amour-propre” reflected in a literature in which “villains are always after money, gold, wealth,” as Jochen Schulte-Susse accurately observes in “Can the Disempowered Read Mass-Produced Narratives in their Own Voice?” Cultural Critique 10 (1988), 179. The “rise of capitalism,” as intellectual historian Thomas L. Haskell notes, was concomitant with the origins of humanitarianism not just as a medium for the expression of class interest, but as a change in “perception or cognitive style” marked by a “change in the perception of causal connection and consequently a shift in the conventions of moral responsibility [at the heart of] the new constellation of attitudes and activities that we call humanitarianism,” “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1” American Historical Review 90.2 (1985), 342. This new style of perception exposing the immoral behavior behind economic domination and its resultant social inequality, I argue, is particularly well suited to the history of literary circles. These circles entered the market from an alternative point of access given the morally freighted nature of their product compared to other nonliterary products. As such, coteries were not only allowed to, but in the antebellum era at the height of the market revolution, they were indeed expected to, comment on the materialistic tendencies in the culture, hence the outgrowth of humanitarianism and anticapitalism coteries represented as ideological positions toward the shifting economic terrain.
Henry David Thoreau, Waiden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1971, 118. For an especially insightful treatment of Thoreau’s ambivalence toward the market, see Richard Teichgraeber’s “‘A Yankee Diogenes’: Thoreau and the Market,” The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 293–324.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Mideola, NY: Dover, 2003), 7.
George Ripley, qtd. in Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 156.
Qtd. in Charles C. Cole, Jr., The Social Ideas of Northern Evangelists, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 102.
John Evelev, Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 67. Evelev’s single author project differs from my emphasis on commercial strategies—both within and outside of the literary texts—each coterie used to enter the market, as well as its internal workings, economies of exchange, social capital building, and methods of “controlling the terms of its members’ entrance into the marketplace,” 67.
The 1840s saw a sharp rise in the “wave of association” in the United States, the source of which is traced by business economics historians Alexander M. Carr-Saunders and P.A. Wilson, The Professions (New York: Frank Cass, 1964), 300. For details on the emergence of professional associations, see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), and The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). For the impact of the association movement on literary themes, see Robert Dean Lewis, Individualism and Associationism in American Literature, 1830–1850 (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1971).
Lucy Larcom, qtd. in Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005), 173.
Leon Jackson, “The Social Construction of Thomas Carlyle’s New England Reputation, 1834–36” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 106.1 (1996), 186. The circulation of Carlyle’s book throughout the Transcendental circle established his prominence among the group as rapidly as it was expunged. The example is telling of the importance of the group’s collective reputation, which according to Jackson, came under direct threat when Carlyle’s surprising sympathy with the South surfaced in his insistence on publishing proslavery articles, Jackson, “Carlyle,” 186. For the cultural construction of Emerson and Thoreau’s public reputations, see Richard Teichgraeber, Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Lawrence Stone, “Prosopography” Daedalusl 100 (Winter 1971), 57.
Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 13.
For more on the market revolution behind the professionalization of authorship, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford University Press, 1991). On the issue of professionalization of authorship during the antebellum period, Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters offers the finest, and to my knowledge only, challenge to William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), the wildly influential pioneer of the study of literary economics. Jackson rejects his progressive, triumphalist historiography as well as his definition of authorship as full-time application to the craft, which he rightly claims, would eliminate Hawthorne and Irving from the category of “professional author,” leaving very few qualifiers other than Cooper, 10–23. Jackson’s assessment informs my understanding of authorship as a pursuit narrowly straddling amateurism and professionalism, which the Zborays have reinforced in Literary Dollars and Social Sense. On specialization and the formation of the cultural definition of artistic genius as a category both feared and revered, see Gustavus Stadler, Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840–1890 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). A fine history of the movement toward specialization is in Evelev, 51–78. I make use of all of these superb studies in my examination of coterie culture, which receives mention in each of these works, but not as a sustaining overarching concept. The Zborays’ history is mainly author (and reader) driven, while Jackson emphasizes the multitude of economies of exchange that animated the literary market, particularly the ethos and graft of gift exchange, with close attention to complementary books and their circulation as indices of a significant portion of an author’s work extending beyond composition into tactics of extra-textual self-promotion. His theory is invaluable to this book, as it provides a useful framework for understanding the economic function, monetary and otherwise, of the coteries I explore.
Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: New York Press, 1998), 7.
David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Charlottesville: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xix.
Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008), 172–73.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 126.
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© 2011 David Dowling
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Dowling, D. (2011). Introduction. In: The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117082_1
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