Overview

When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for executing a bookseller, and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition--calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called ""the conflict of the ages,"" the feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted. The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a study of the terms of that feud in early America. Ranging from the Revolution to the Civil War, Michael Everton explores moral propriety in American literary culture, arguing that debates over the business of authorship and publishing in the first century of the United States were simultaneously debates over the ethics and character of capitalism. The Grand Chorus of Complaint shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from the ""real"" issues affecting American literary culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. Drawing on a diverse archive, Everton argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercial world preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. This study illustrates that ethics should matter as much to literary and book historians as much as it has come to matter--again--to literary critics and theorists.

Full Product Details

9780199751785

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Reviews

richly explores how this vision of culture and commerce worked its way into the business of print between the end of the American Revolution in 1776 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. David Finkelstein, Times Literary Supplement Everton's close reading of the language of complaint in his many fascinating case studies illuminates the precise nature of the author-publisher relationship. Katharine Reeve, Times Higher Education

richly explores how this vision of culture and commerce worked its way into the business of print between the end of the American Revolution in 1776 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. * David Finkelstein, Times Literary Supplement * Everton's close reading of the language of complaint in his many fascinating case studies illuminates the precise nature of the author-publisher relationship. * Katharine Reeve, Times Higher Education *

Everton's close reading of the language of complaint in his many fascinating case studies illuminates the precise nature of the author-publisher relationship. Katharine Reeve, Times Higher Education

<br> Michael J. Everton has provided a fascinating account, supported by deep historical and archival research, of the contentious dealings between authors and publishers that occur along the ragged line between art and commerce. --James L. W. West III, author of American Authors and the LiteraryMarketplace since 1900<p><br> Members of the book trade receive bad press these days, creating the impression that the modern book trade is, ethically speaking, a little shaky. Those in the book business argue otherwise, defending their actions even while occasionally backpedaling. In his bold and far-reaching study, Michael Everton makes clear that such ethical debates about the book trade go all the way back to the eighteenth century. The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a book of great importance, insight, and originality. --Leon Jackson, author of The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America<p><br> In this illuminating, impressively researched, and engagingly written boo

Author Information

Michael Everton is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Print Culture Program Simon Fraser University.

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