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

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace, by Susan M. Ryan, analyzes contesting voices in the discourse surrounding legitimate authorship in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Ryan argues that an American author's moral authority, her or his publicly negotiated character, comprised a mode of currency that helped constitute print markets as its own value fluctuated. Ryan revises E. P. Thompson's term "moral economy": an unstated agreement within a community about what practices are legitimate (6). Pluralizing and destabilizing Thompson's term, Moral Economies traces how authors' moral authority was constructed, attacked, and recuperated in exchanges among authors, editors, publishers, and reviewers. Each chapter sets moral authority in tension with scandal, which clarifies the limits of decorum. This is a groundbreaking book whose moral economies provide a new subject for reception studies. Legacy's readers will appreciate the nuance with which Moral Economies traces intersections of gender, race, class, and assessments of authors' literary merit and moral fitness, because it often reveals agency and resiliency for women writers where they are least expected.

Chapter 1 treats a literary scandal prompted by James Fenimore Cooper's combative personality, in which reviewers, editors, and Cooper himself conflated his personality with his novels' literary value, interweaving both with literary nationalism and concerns about property. Ryan observes that after Cooper's early novels, readers were invested in him as a representative US author and felt betrayed when he spent years in Europe and criticized US provincialism. Reviewers charged him with national disloyalty. Upon returning from Europe, he was accused in the press of being undemocratic when he forbade neighbors to picnic on land he had inherited from his father. Cooper, too, entangled his life with his art, writing a fictionalized narrative of the event and suing those who criticized it for libel. In the interchange between readers' investments, Cooper's property, his reputation, and courtroom proceedings, Ryan demonstrates how his moral authority had to be witnessed and defended.

Chapter 2 explores negotiations over moral authority in paratexts of the period, which Ryan argues were crucial for building, restoring, and undermining an author's moral authority. After briefly discussing prefaces by Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the chapter focuses on African American life writing. Ryan underscores William Andrews's argument that authors of slave narratives faced constraints in paratexts written by whites. She differs from Andrews in insisting that the paratexts' authors also had to negotiate their own authority. In documents accompanying The History of Mary Prince, Ryan traces competing voices, as white, male authors asserted their own authority, deploying their paratexts both for and against Prince's authority and against writers of other paratexts. Ryan also examines the contradictions confronted by authors of slave narratives who wrote their own paratexts amid racist distrust. She ends the chapter with a discussion of Elizabeth Keckley's preface to her 1868 book Behind the Scenes, arguing that the formerly enslaved Keckley, who became Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker, tried to negotiate her own status and renegotiate Mary Lincoln's reputation. Ryan traces Keckley's largely unsuccessful attempt to construct her authority amid shifting norms of propriety in the postbellum years. This chapter treats a wide range of authors and genres, demonstrating how fundamental to literary studies its topic is. Ryan's careful reading teases out the agency of African American authors, including Prince, whose illiteracy proscribed her direct voice.

Chapter 3 argues that Frederick Douglass was obliged to repair his moral authority after his break with William Lloyd Garrison and that his work as author of My Bondage and My Freedom and editor of The North Star and of Frederick Douglass' Paper was therefore considerably more defensive than scholars have realized. Ryan demonstrates that Douglass rigorously negotiated the intersection of authorship, moral reputation, the language of property, literary merit, and marketability. She...