Figuring authorship in antebellum America

The increased demand for salable entertainment, for pleasing an expanded and unknown audience in its moments of leisure, fostered a new consciousness of authorship as a commercial and professional mode of work in the first half of the nineteenth century in America.

This book argues that a range of canonical and more recently enfranchised antebellum authors - from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern - rhetorically reconstructed their newly professionalized work by mediating it through other forms of labor.

Throughout, the author argues that particular modes of mediation between authorship and other labors matter not for one author but many; not for one gender but both; not in one genre but several. Thus his interpretation suggests that the two realms of authorship most typically separated in studies of the antebellum years - sentimental, female authorship and romantic, male authorship - may not be so entirely separate.

Rather, they tend to rely on differently inflected versions of very similar rhetorics to define the authorial work performed within those rhetorics.