"The Rage for Book-Making": Textual Overproduction and the Crisis of Social Knowledge in the Early Republic

From the late eighteenth century to the present day, critical accounts of the post-Revolutionary period have often characterized the era as one in which authors were rare and literature was uncommon. In one typical lament from the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799–1800) described a litany of factors that were deemed to be holding back American culture: amongst them, inadequate schooling, the lack of financial reward for writers, and a dearth of large-scale printing outlets. "The number of those who write books . . . in our native country, is . . . extremely small," the Monthly noted in an essay "On American Literature" (1799). "That set or class of men, denominated authors, and which is so numerous in the European world, is, on this side of the ocean, so few as scarce to be discernable amidst the armies of merchants, artizans, physicians, advocates, and divines, scattered through the land. Indeed, if an author be defined to be a creature who devotes regular and daily portions of his time to writing that which shall some time be published, I question whether one such creature shall be found among us" (339). Reiterated by the impatient avatars of the American Renaissance, this reading of the literary culture of the early republic was then substantiated in intellectual histories written during the twentieth century. Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous dictum that "from 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought" (440) in the state of Massachusetts, Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought agrees: "The Revolutionary upheaval produced no polite literature in any respects comparable to its utilitarian prose. The expiring . . . literature of England was an exotic that refused to be naturalized, and the times were unpropitious for the creation of a native poetry" (248). And similarly, in From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury suggest that "[p]erhaps the most remarkable thing about the American literature of national construction between the Revolution and the 1820s is not its quality, but the fact that any got written at all. . . . There was no clear American aesthetic, no patronage, no developed profession of letters, no certain audience" (61). In short, it seems safe to conclude that the cultural landscape of the early republic is best represented as a barren and sparsely populated terrain.

But if we look a little more closely at the literary discourses of the post-Revolutionary period we can discover a perspective that is missing from these accounts: one that emphasizes overabundance rather than scarcity, and excess rather than infertility. In 1807, for instance, The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1803–11) carried an essay which complained that "[t]he numerous revolutions and extensive improvements in the various sciences, the facility of multiplying copies of books by the art of printing, the brevity of life, and its necessary duties and avocations, preclude even the most diligent student from the perusal but of a small portion of the innumerable books, daily issuing from the press" ("Silva" 84). Nor was The Monthly Anthology alone in its concern about the large number of publications that appeared to be inundating the new nation. "The art of printing has multiplied books to such a degree that it is a vain attempt either to collect or read all that has been produced," The Port Folio (1801–27) had confirmed a few years earlier: "The volumes of scientifical and literary societies or academies alone are infinite" ("An Author's Evenings" 298). Importantly then, such arguments provide us with an intriguing counternarrative to the tale told by The Monthly Magazine and its successors. Moreover, not only does the rhetoric of overproduction complicate the monological version of post-Revolutionary print culture with which we are usually presented, it also calls into question one of the basic presuppositions of American literary history.

Echoing the American Renaissance's own approval of the democratization of writing, critics have invariably assumed that the ongoing expansion of print culture in the post...