The Business of Letters

"Scholars of authorship in antebellum America have traditionally approached their subject through the lens of professionalization, exploring the ways in which writing moved away from amateurism and into the capitalist marketplace. The Business of Letters breaks new ground by challenging the dominant professionalization model with its vision of a single literary marketplace. Leon Jackson shows how antebellum authors participated in a variety of different economies - including patronage, charity, gift exchange, and competition - each of which had its own rules and reciprocities, its own ethics and exchange rituals, and sometimes even its own currencies. Jackson reveals authors to have been social agents whose acts of authorial exchange involved them in dense webs of community. The decisive transformation of the antebellum period, he concludes, was not from amateurism to professionalism, but rather, from socially embedded exchange to impersonally conducted business."--Jacket.