2021/06/21 by David Dowling · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Literature: history, themes, analysis
paper · doi:10.1515/9783110592238-003
openalex publication_date 2021/06/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Antebellum literary culture developed amid dramatic increases in production, distribution, and consumption of books and periodicals. Romantic literature’s signal works at the time that drew legions of authors into this expanding industry included Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature. Irving reconciled the transformation of the old patronage system into a competitive free-market scramble by embracing “the romance of trade,” especially in his highly idealized self-portrait as sojourner traveler and independent agent. Emerson openly assailed crass materialism and exhorted the younger generations to rebel against conventional vocations. Intellectual networks were instrumental in shaping the American Romantic period beginning with the New York circles of Irving’s Knickerbockers and extending into Emerson’s Concord Transcendentalists. This chapter examines how those networks helped promote and market authors to the wider public. Critiques of capitalism at the heart of antebellum literary culture regarded the commodification of literature anathema to the romantic notions of authorship as a solitary pursuit driven by intuitive epiphanies and inspirations. Some authors saw publication as a dehumanizing and debasing commercialization of knowledge, while others associated with American Romanticism surprisingly found inspiration in the free market economy’s profit motive. Yet that position was seldom emphasized in the imaginative writings of the major intellectual networks of antebellum America. Instead, a distinctly Romantic fervor prevailed in opposition to the increasingly specialized systems of mechanized labor that threatened to diminish the significance of the human spirit and the power of individual intuition.