Customer Reviews

Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

William Charvat's 1959 exploratory study, "Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850," is considered by many important people to be a, if not the, foundational text in what is commonly called History-of-the-Book literary study. In it, Charvat claims that the initial phase of widespread literary publishing in America, from 1790 (the year of the first American copyright law) through 1850 (the establishment of a transnational railroad) is significant, in that it shows the logistical and economic difficulties in permitting an arena for a truly American literary tradition to flourish. An Emersonian project of historical recovery, Charvat goes to great lengths in an admittedly brief work to detail the circumstances surrounding the birth of American literary publishing. Charvat's study organizes itself around three central elements in early American publishing: the 'axis' of publishing, New York and Philadelphia, the economic relationship between authors and their publishers, and the notion that genre was an important, if not critically vital element in determining what got published in the early days of the American Republic.

For the centers of publishing, Charvat determines that New York and Philadelphia's access and control of major waterways in the decades before the transnational railroad meant that publishers in these two cities were responsible for gauging, responding to, and even setting the standards for literary taste and acceptability. In the section on authors and publishers, Charvat details the economic difficulties in getting new American authors and their works out to a general public. This involves not only such basic determinants as whether the author himself was fiscally capable of funding the publication of his own works, but the ways in which works were physically published (the quality of paper, printing, binding, etc), and how early American authors were forced to deal with cheap reprinting of new and 'canonical' works from British authors. In the final section, on genre, Charvat says that a work's genre was yet another constraint facing developing American authors. He discusses conventional 18th and early 19th century notions of poetry as the most highly-regarded form of literary art, and the ways in which early American novelists were beset by physical constraints on length and content. Charvat says that indeed, history was the most popular genre of book economically in the early republic.

A fascinating, if sometimes technical work, Charvat set a standard in this particular type of literary study, and opened doors for succeeding generations of literary historical scholars. Charvat himself admits that his intent, in a typically New Critical fashion, is not to displace the content and inherent literary qualities of any early American production as the most important and worthy elements of study.

However, as Michael Winship's extremely useful and lucid Afterword posits, Charvat's study has given us new ways to appreciate American literary history and studies of individual texts in context. Winship cites the importance of realizing the 'dynamics' of publishing in literary study - determining how, why, and even if, texts are received by contemporary audiences, and how that can colour our own present-day readings of literature, and not simply that of the United States. Winship also provides a broad and well-annotated bibliography, laying out the progress and impact of Charvat's book and its inheritors since its own publication.