Abstract

This essay proposes an examination of Rousseau's engagement with the book trade, particularly in the wake of his departure from Paris in the 1750s. It focuses on his epistolary construction of the literary market, considered not as an objective commercial domain, but as a conceptualized authorial space that gave expression to an evolving set of hopes and anxieties. In his letters to publishers, Rousseau produced an ambiguous image of the book trade as a medium that both facilitated and obstructed the new forms of self-expression that he came to identify as authorship. In this contradiction, the literary market took shape as a modern literary field.

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