The Transformation of Authorship in America

By Grantland S. Rice

Book Overview

Did the emergence of a free press liberate eighteenth-century American authors? Most critics and historians have assumed so. In a study certain to force a rethinking of early American literary culture, Grantland S. Rice overturns this dominant view. Rice argues that the lapse of Puritan censorship, the consolidation of copyright law, and the explosion of a commercial print culture confronted writers in the new United States with a striking predicament: the depoliticization and commodification of public expression.

Rice shows that the rigorous censorship practiced by Puritan authorities conferred an implicit prestige on texts as civic interventions, helping to foster a vigorous and indigenous tradition of sociopolitical criticism. With special attention to the sudden emergence of the novel in post-revolutionary America, Rice reveals how the emergence of economic liberalism undermined the earlier tradition of political writing by transforming American authorship from an expression of individual civic conscience to a market-oriented profession.

Includes discussions of the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Cr vecoeur, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226711234
• ISBN13: 9780226711232
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.2"