From Patronage to the Mass Market: Institutionalizing Literary Knowledge Cultures in the 19th-Century United States
Final Report Abstract
This collaborative research project investigated the nexus between sites of institutionalized knowledge and central developments within nineteenth-century American literature. The project challenged more traditional forms of academic literary periodization in that it focused on the multiple connections between a gradually professionalized book market, facilities of higher learning, and modes of cultural patronage. The principal investigators each explored a central transition period within the literary history of the United States, so as to shed light on the changing relationship between patronage and markets on the one hand and literary activity on the other. Based on extensive archival research, the central research findings point to the emergence and evolution of literary authority at the interface of education, knowledge, and commerce. The first sub-project centered on the Massachusetts Institution, a state-sponsored corporation of libraries, museums, and professional organizations which triggered public debates in local assemblies and newspapers in the 1810s and 1820s. Beyond this institution, the sub-project also traced complex networks of publishing and bookselling that were instrumental to the rising importance of Boston as the center of American national culture. In light of these findings, the close connection of culture and politics across multiple institutional configurations can be seen as having enabled a set of patronage models for the support of art and artists. The sub-project thus provides important additions and revisions to the well-researched literary nationalism of the 1830s and 1840s, which both in its primary sources and in its historiographical framing expresses a predominant rhetoric of writerly autonomy and radical artistic freedom. The second sub-project analyzed 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, The Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, McClure's and The Colored American Magazine. These periodicals catered to a growing middle class and especially in the 1890s triggered a complex metadiscourse on the professionalization of literary writing and on the relationship between commercial success and literary value. As the findings of this project document, the open and unsettled state of the market and knowledge institutions in the literary field of the turn of the century gave rise to a host of little studied genres, styles, and formats of writing. The overall project finally uses these insights to propose the novel concept of “unsettled institutions,” which aims to provide an important theoretical impulse for the historicization of the current “institutional turn” in American literary studies.
Publications
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A School of Its Own: US Naturalism and the Demands of Professional Labor. College Literature, 51(4), 476-501.
Loeffler, Philipp
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American Literary Institutions Around 1900. College Literature, 51(4), 429-444.
Liming, Sheila; Sedlmeier, Florian & Starre, Alexander
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Literary Sites of Institutional Confirmation and Critique: Howells in the Study, Cather in the Office. College Literature, 51(4), 669-698.
Sedlmeier, Florian & Starre, Alexander
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Unsettled Literary Institutions in the Nineteenth Century. Anglia, 143(4), 706-731.
Löffler, Philipp & Starre, Alexander
