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  • The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya
  • Günter Leypoldt
The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market. By Francesca Sawaya. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. vii + 248 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

One of the main concerns of Francesca Sawaya’s illuminating study is to question the idea that during the mid- and late-nineteenth century the modes of literary productions shifted “from a constraining system of patronage by elites and genteel amateurism” to “a free literary market” that democratized the literary field by enabling the rise of “a new profession in which writers could support themselves without a need for patrons and sponsors.” She shows how this “standard narrative” is not helpful to literary historians, because it relies on misconceptions typical of (neo)liberal or neoclassical economics. Following Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters: Authorial Economics in Antebellum America (2008), Sawaya bases her argument on Karl Polanyi’s insights about the social “embeddedness” of commercial markets. Just as free-market fundamentalism obscures the massive infrastructural state interventionism required to sustain a self-regulating or laissez-faire economy, the notion that professional authorship emerges from an open exchange on a market of literary commodities overlooks the considerable symbolic assets (prestige, legitimacy, honor, etc.) on which literary authority depends, and thus fails to see the important forms of structural or institutional patronage that allow modern writers to play for authority and peer recognition instead of commercial success.

The transformation of literary patronage in modernizing print markets is a fascinating topic, and there is much work to be done to explain the various market-sheltered forms of authorship that emerged within the late-nineteenth century public sphere. Sawaya restricts her focus to the connections between literary patronage and corporate-based philanthropy. In order to distinguish philanthropy from broader, transhistorical aspects of charity or altruism, she defines it as a socio-economic regime of giving that [End Page 92] first emerges with the organizational revolution of Gilded Age high-finance capitalism. Philanthropy is thus understood as a socio-economic practice that has less to do with grass-roots associations, face-to-face generosity or such charitable institutions as Jane Addams’ Hull House, than with the figure of the philanthropic “robber baron” epitomized by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (the latter’s thought about “the difficult art of giving” is quoted in the book title).

Sawaya believes that the emergence of corporate philanthropy evidences a late-nineteenth-century “crisis in liberal economics” that forced the supporters of corporate capitalism to think about how one can intervene in the economic system to counteract the rising social inequality “while shoring up an ideology of non-interventionism.” She suggests that the structural shifts related to this crisis had a significant impact on American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, and that we can therefore learn a great deal from the period’s literary representations of the economic world. This point is developed in five carefully argued chapters on Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser. Most of these chapters combine readings of selected novels (for example, Henry James’ portrayal of philanthropic patronage in The Princess Casamassima and The Golden Bowl, or Theodore Dreiser’s in The Financier) with biographical accounts of how these writers relied on and coped with real-life patronage or philanthropic connections (as in Mark Twain’s handling of his friendship with the Vice President of Standard Oil, Henry H. Rogers). At times these readings blur the sharp conceptual focus set down in the introduction: when Sawaya dwells on such issues as Chesnutt’s failure to gain access to high-cultural friendship networks or Howells’ career-boosting entanglement with the political spoils system, the specific connections between corporate philanthropy and literary patronage retreat behind what would seem to be more general aspects of literary authority, such as access to power networks, literary peer recognition, the relevance of social capital, and the like. But this inclusiveness enables Sawaya to provide a rich ethnography of the writer-philantropist relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. Her book compellingly reminds us that...

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