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InventingtheLiterati Poe’s Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture J. Gerald Kennedy As Edgar Poe seems to have grasped from his debut as a magazinist, authors are made, not born, fashioned by a subtle process embedded in the systems of production and distribution that constitute print culture. Beyond the strange genius flaunted in his poetry and tales, Poe possessed an uncanny understanding of the power of magazines and newspapers to create cultural icons. Apart from book reviews , his various efforts to construct an idea of the literary nation and to install himself as a critical kingpin—by naming the country’s principal literati, by promoting a quality periodical to feature U.S. authors exclusively, and by compiling materials for an Ameri­ can literary history—comprise an illuminating yet largely unappreciated dimension of Poe’s achievement. In a famous essay titled “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault deconstructs “the author” as a cultural invention, associating the very concept with a “privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.” Writing near the end of the twentieth century, Foucault declares the death of the author and (in a move endemic to structuralism) asserts the autonomy of the text as a play of signifiers , but he also acknowledges the historical rootedness of what he calls the “author function.” Notions of authorship began in antiquity, when the Greeks revered those who gave lasting form to primal myths and narratives. But the modern concept of “the author” achieved currency much later. Foucault offhandedly remarks, Certainly, it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of “the-man-and-his-work criticism” began.1 13 14 | J. Gerald Kennedy But Foucault offers only provocative hints about the emergence of the author as a cultural entity, leaving to others the task of reconstructing the rise of professional authorship and the fetishizing of the man or woman of letters as a public personage . To be sure, each national culture has its own peculiar history of authorship , reflecting the spread of literacy, the rise of a middle-class reading public, the emergence of a publishing industry, the distribution of books, the proliferation of public libraries, and the commercialization of literature, which almost from the outset (as Foucault suggests) capitalized on the author’s name as a trademark, the brand of a certain quality and style. Taking up the challenge of Foucault, Martha Woodmansee has traced the modern European concept of the author to the eighteenth century, citing two instrumental cultural developments. Symptomatic of the transition from neoclassicism to Romanticism, one involves a radical rethinking of the origin of writing, a process Woodmansee illustrates by juxtaposing the aesthetics of Pope and Wordsworth . She contrasts the earlier Enlightenment model of the writer as “master of a body of rules, preserved and handed down . . . in rhetoric and poetics, for manipulating traditional materials”—a model sometimes inflected by suggestions of divine or artistic inspiration—with an emerging, Romantic conception of the poet or novelist as one who displays original genius by creating “something utterly new, unprecedented.” By ascribing texts to “the writer’s own genius,” readers and critics “transform the writer into a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product.” Woodmansee observes that this shift occurs within a significant historical and economic context—the transition from “the limited patronage of an aristocratic society” to “the democratic patronage of the marketplace .”2 Turning to Germany and the publishing dilemmas of Gissing, Schiller, and others, she sees modern authorship, conceived as the display of individual literary prowess, entangled in legal questions of property and copyright. To this account one might add that—apposite to the succession of European revolutions from 1789 to 1848—the emergence of the author also roughly parallels the emergence of modern nations, democratic republicanism, and the “imagined communities ” bound together (as Benedict Anderson suggests) by “print-languages” and common cultural practices.3 This juxtaposition forms the premise of Patrick Parrinder’s sweeping study, Nation and Novel, which emphasizes the formation of collective British national consciousness, paradoxically, through solitary acts of novel-reading—and through ongoing public recalculations of the nation’s leading authors.4 The fact that Samuel Johnson could publish The Lives of the Poets confident [52.14...

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