The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace by Susan M. Ryan (review)

Literary history can be reduced to two paradigms. The first, which conceived literature as a discourse designed “to delight and instruct,” held firm from ancient Roman times, when Horace first coined the phrase, through the eighteenth century. The second, which espoused “art for art’s sake,” emerged in the nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe coined the earliest formulation of this second idea in an 1844 Graham’s essay, in which he emphasizes the “poem written solely for the poem’s sake.” Poe’s concept was absolutely radical. What he said, in essence, was that a literary work need not have a didactic purpose. It need not instruct at all: it need only exist as a beautiful piece of art. While offering an alternative approach to literature, Poe’s paradigm did not supplant Horace’s. As Susan M. Ryan reminds us in her new book, The Moral Economies of American Authorship, American readers in the middle third of the nineteenth century accepted and insisted upon literature’s didactic component. A “good” book should be good both aesthetically and morally. The moral character of nineteenth-century authors, Ryan argues persuasively, functioned as literary capital that shaped the promotion and reception of writers and their works.

Oxford Studies in American Literary History, the series in which Ryan’s Moral Economies appears, is the brainchild of editor Gordon Hutner. This series is an outgrowth of American Literary History, the Oxford journal Hutner founded in 1989 and the first major journal published in the wake of New Historicism, the critical approach that emerged in the eighties as an effort to rehistoricize the study of American literature after New Criticism had dehistoricized it. However, therein lay a problem: New Criticism had been so successful for so long that the philosophy and methodology of literary history had largely been lost by the time New Historicism emerged. Trained by New Critics, New Historicists have had difficulty doing the kind of hardnosed historical research that defined the field before New Criticism. Furthermore, the critical approach of the New Historicists, informed by a political agenda reflecting the dual influence of the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Movement, came to center on issues of race, class, and gender. Essentially they took historically inflected topics and applied a New Critical methodology, interpreting the literature of the past through a modern moral viewpoint. Consequently many of their so-called historical interpretations paradoxically proved to be anachronistic.

In light of those developments, Ryan’s Moral Economies is a breath of fresh air. Instead of imposing a modern moral viewpoint onto her subject, she avoids anachronism, seeking to recapture the moral judgments through which nineteenth-century American literature was interpreted when it was published. In her introduction Ryan explains that many current English professors have overemphasized modern political and ideological issues as factors in the production and reception of American literature in the nineteenth century. In recent decades academic critics have attributed to the debate over slavery “a controlling influence that the era’s primary documents do not fully support” (12). Ryan’s challenge to the dominant critical hegemony in and of itself makes Moral Economies worth reading.

Though we can admire Ryan’s willingness to boldly go against the critical practices established by New Historicism, the fact that she attended graduate school since the New Historicism became the dominant approach to the study of American literature means that her work inevitably reflects some of its shortcomings. Though appearing in a series supposedly devoted to “literary history,” Moral Economies, like some of the other works in the series, shows little sense of story. The French use the same word for both “history” and “story”; those of us who write in English must continually remind ourselves that when writing history we must never forget the story. Once Ryan defines her period of study—the middle third of the nineteenth...