London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek (review)

Joseph Rezek’s study of nineteenth-century transatlantic literature argues persuasively for the need to overhaul our understanding of “provinciality.” Noting the term’s Latin origins in the distant territories of the Roman Empire, and emphasizing the negative associations of cultural backwardness that still cling to it, Rezek theorizes instead a supple conception that accounts for the give-and-take between Scottish, Irish, and American writers and the London publishing world. This book engages in such an analysis by recuperating the category of aesthetics—which, as Rezek notes, generally has received scant treatment in Anglo-American book history— and recasting provincial literature as a complex negotiation of important tensions in nineteenth-century ideas about aesthetics whereby “literature transcends nationality and indelibly expresses it” (3). The book’s central argument is that such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving developed different versions of an “aesthetics of provinciality” that consistently idealized the domain of literary production as a way of paradoxically acknowledging national differences between provincial and metropolitan cultures while emphasizing the rarefied aesthetic discourses through which they could communicate with London publishers and readers. These writers felt “the centripetal pull of London” and yet were able to effectively negotiate—in their prefaces and correspondence as well as in the formal and thematic contours of their fiction—transnational cultural boundaries and stereotypes to their own advantage.

After establishing the historical and theoretical issues complicating the categories of the colonial, national, and provincial, Rezek’s opening two chapters display impressive knowledge of both the larger trends and personal stories in early nineteenth-century transatlantic book history. They provide engaging, even entertaining, microhistories of the chaotic dynamics of the London and provincial book trades whereby publishing houses most often needed to collaborate across long distances and uncertain communication networks to distribute—and profit from—the transatlantic commerce of print. On both sides of the Atlantic, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Philadelphia and New York, there are in commercial records and private correspondence of publishers the shrill and self-righteous denunciations of being cheated or misled. Rezek is right to focus partly on the Waverly industry in early US publishing (a gargantuan fact of ante-bellum US literary history largely overlooked in nationalist accounts of American literary history). Scott’s poetry and then his historical novels became the site of important transatlantic partnerships, which navigated fitfully the absence of international copyright (allowing for easy pirating in the United States) and courtesies of trade practices among London publishers and booksellers. In this transatlantic publishing arena, where London exerted commercial and cultural force, and provincial reprinting was decentralized and yet aggressively competitive, the timing and place of first publication was crucially important.

Rezak’s analysis, moreover, further explores the fascinating dynamic of commercial profit and personal reputation shaping early nineteenth-century publishers’ accounts of themselves. By examining, for example, the often fraught and openly furious relations among publishers—Scott’s Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable, and his major American one Mathew Carey—Rezek unveils a complex set of transatlantic negotiations whereby financial gain and professional honor animated one another. Rezek brings the skills of literary analysis to read closely these anxious and outraged missives, which testify to the ongoing need for literary capitalists to privately and publicly uphold (or fictionalize) professional standards and personal honor (and so much so that, as Rezek later argues, Scott himself fictionalizes the volatility of transatlantic publishing in one of his late novels). In addition to demonstrating the uneasy emergence of modern literary publishing in the United States, Rezek also importantly argues for the overall shift in transatlantic publishing, which increasingly (despite London’s continued central place) became more fluid and reciprocal: “the nature of the book trade’s connectedness changed from a system [dominated by London] to a more mixed system in which dissemination occurred in multiple directions” (61).

That argument is crucial to Rezek...