Authorship in Nineteenth-Century America (Seminar)

Authorship in Nineteenth-Century American is an ENGL 7350 course offering in the Spring of 2009 taught by Ezra Greenspan.

Course Description
This graduate seminar offers a broad historical, historiographical, and theoretical overview of ideas, constructions, functions, and practices of authorship in the United States during the nineteenth century. Although the course concentrates on the normally privileged category of American literary authorship, it also covers a broader array of authorial practices and formations: named, anonymous, or pseudonymous; single or collaborative; author-initiated or printer/publisher-initiated; copyrighted or uncopyrighted; learned or unlearned; elite or popular; instructive or entertaining; recurrent or single-issued; local, regional, national, or international; American or foreign. Furthermore, it integrates its discussion of authorship into a consideration of the related factors comprising literary culture, including reading, printing, and publishing.

Primary Texts

 * Apess, William. A Son of the Forest and Other Writings (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
 * Cahan, Abraham. History of the United States.
 * Chesnutt, Charles. The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt (Penguin, 2008).
 * Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1960).
 * Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall (Penguin, 1997).
 * Harris, H. A. The Horse Thief; or The Maiden and Negro. A Tale of the Prairies. (United States Publishing Company, 1845). (NB The text was the sample dime novel and was distributed as a .pdf file under the recommendation of Russell White, who had recently acquired the text for DeGoyler Library's collection.)
 * Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harvard, 1987).
 * Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Dover, 1990). (NB Students used the same edition for SMU-in-Taos 2008's Critical Race Seminar.)
 * Twain, Mark. Pudd’nhead Wilson (Penguin, 1969). (NB The class did not study this text due to time restraints.)
 * Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (Library of America, 1982).

Secondary Texts
These texts were distributed through Blackboard.
 * Baker, Thomas N. Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (Oxford University Press, 1999).
 * Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
 * Buinicki, Martin T. Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, 2006).
 * Cahan, Abraham. History of the United States, in Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (New York University Press, 2000).
 * Casper, Scott, et al. A History of the Book in America, vol. 3; The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina, 2007).
 * Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (orig. ed. 1968; Columbia University Press, 1992).
 * Cohen, Patricia Cline, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. The Flash Press (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
 * Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (1969; Cornell University Press, 1977): 113-38.
 * Franklin, R. W. The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1998).
 * Homestead, Melissa J. American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
 * Jackson, Leon. The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford University Press, 2008).
 * James, Henry. The American Scene (Harper, 1907).
 * Kaestle, Carl F., and Janice A Radway, eds. A History of the Book in America, vol. 4; Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940 (University of North Carolina, 2009).
 * Konkle, Maureen. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
 * Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (Columbia University Press, 2007).
 * McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (University of Pennsylvania, 2003).
 * Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 1990).
 * Woodress, James, ed. Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism (orig. ed. 1956; Norton, 1971).
 * Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (University of Georgia, 1985).
 * Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi, eds. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Duke University Press, 1994).
 * Yellin, Jean Fagin, et al. The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2 vols. (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).