Cheap Poe and Other Bargains: Unpaid Work and Energy in Early Nineteenth-Century U.S. Publishing

This essay argues that the reprint publishing economy of the early nineteenth-century United States, which is often figured as a benign purveyor of knowledge, was in fact energized by an aggressive capitalism distinguished by its radical devaluation of intellectual content. Examining transatlantic copyright debates in Poe's era, the essay argues that U.S. publishing capitalism was engaged in the transformation of cognitive assets into raw natural resources, what Jason W. Moore calls "cheap nature." Reimagining intellectual content as flowing water or wild grass, U.S. publishing capitalism was able to efface the work of authors as a cost inside text production.