From Patronage to the Mass Market: Institutionalizing Literary Knowledge Cultures in the 19th-Century United States

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. Philipp Löffler; Dr. Alexander Starre
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522842143

This collaborative research project investigates the nexus between sites of institutionalized knowledge and central developments within 19th-century American literature. The project circumnavigates more traditional forms of literary periodization in that it focuses on the multiple connections between a gradually professionalized book market, facilities of higher learning, and modes of cultural patronage. This perspective results in a twofold research agenda. On the one hand, the project seeks to trace the emergence and diversification of US-American literary nationalism by looking at the institutional conditions that allowed, promoted, and prohibited literary participation in the US throughout the 19th century. American literature gained relevance and cultural authority whenever authors could partake in and profit from state-sponsored or private forms of patronage. Literary authority often resulted directly from socio-institutional modes of protection that occurred at the interface of education, knowledge, and commerce. On the other hand, the project combines sociological approaches within contemporary literary studies in the wake of the so-called ‘institutional turn’ with historically and epistemologically oriented scholarship. That way, the dynamics of literary professionalization that shaped larger parts of 19th-century US literature will appear related more directly to forms of cultural knowledge and their institutional settings. In order to illustrate the practical consequences of this approach, the proposed subprojects center around two specific fields of literary activity, one situated in the 1810s and 1820s, the second at around the turn of the 19th century. At the center of the first field stands the Massachusetts Institution, a state-sponsored corporation of libraries, museums, and professional organizations through which American-born authors were to be supported in their endeavors to produce nationally specific literature. Studying the attempts to establish this network of facilities and sponsors will shed light on the intimate relationship between politics and culture that prepared many of the more extensively researched discourses of literary nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s. The second field of inquiry is devoted to forms of literary knowledge that took shape in and through mass-marketed periodicals at the end of the 19th century, among them The Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, McClure's und The Colored American Magazine. These periodicals had a broad target audience and catered in particular to a growing „professional-managerial class“ which used these venues as a means of cultural and commercial self-authorization. The analysis of this novel print public is less-directly related to singular canonical literary practitioners and is instead meant to uncover under-researched genres, styles, and formats of writing that fueled the professionalization of the literary field through their circulation in these magazines.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants