Authorship and Reprinting

REVIEWS Authorship and Reprinting Meredith L. McGill. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.viii, 364 pp. In this sophisticated book, Meredith McGill describes American periodical culture in the antebellum era as a “literarymarketplace ...upheld by astrongappealto republicanvalues”[3]. Such values underpin the period’sopposition to internationalcopyright ,the exemptionfromwhichled directly to the characteristicpublishing practices of widespreadselection,collation,and republication of writings from other books and journals (manyBritish),practices that some called piracy but that McGill calls “the culture of reprinting.” Our longstanding criticalbias toward the categries of author and nation, McGill argues, has too often made this “marketplacesuffusedwith unauthorized publications”[11 look like merelya confused prelude to the emergence of the great authors and works of the 1850s. But in fact,McGill contends, this practice of reprinting produced a “distinctiveliteraryculturethat cannotadequately be perceived through the opticsof national literarystudy ,a paradigm that we have all but naturalized ”(1). Given that “thinkingglobally”canseem today like the new confessionof faith,McGillmay be setting up a straw man with this “naturalized” nationalism,but it ishard to arguewith itshistoric impact on our received literary history. Take McGdl’s “casestudy”as another attempt to think outside the frame of nation: antebellum publishing , she shows, was simultaneously“regional in articulation and transnationalin scope“[13,both subnationaland extranationalin itsmaterialworkings . Thisisnottoargue,however,thatnineteenthcentury literaryculture w a s not afire with nationaliit sentiments. Indeed, as anyone familiar with the arguments about copyright or with ‘Young America”knows, this culturefocusedquite relentlesslyon questionsofnationaldistinctiveness.But the termsof the claimfor distinctionwere,according to McGill, somewhat different than we have understood. The twenty-year period covered by her studyrepresentswhatMcGill callsthe “strong half-lifeof the republicanunderstanding of print aspublicproperty” [141.The regionaldisarticulation of this literary marketplace was not a hindrance to the expressionof an American republicanism ;it was itself that expression: The redundancies and manifold inefficiencies of the antebellumliterarymarketplacewere not themisfirings of a system in a primitive stage [of] development, they were characteristic features of a social structure that many thought could fend o f f the stultifying effects of British publishing monopolies. Those who explicitly defended the culture of reprinting maintained that it operated as a hedge against the concentration of e c e nomic and political power. [4-51 McGill dedicates two chapters to the arguments about copyright,national interest, and the nature of intellectualand literaryproperty-arguments rehearsed in the Supreme Court (Wheutun v.P h ) ,in the numerous’Memorials” submitted to Congress,and in lively exchangesin the press. Thesechaptersaredistinguishedboth by McGill’s analyticalpressure on the reasoning of the advocates and by her impressive ability to synthesize extensive research. One of the central points is quickly made: “Literarycritics’ bias toward the testimonyofauthorsandthelong-standinga l l i c e of literarystudywith literarynationalismhavecombined to give international copyright advocacy undue prominencein our histories”[83]. McGill accordingly works to right this imbalance by insistingthat the Wheatonv. P h decisionand subsequentcaselaware “markedby an extraordinary literalism in definingwhat it is that authors own Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism and a readiness to qualifyor overturn the rights of authors that often seems excessive” to us [701. (McGillnotes in passing that the pendulum seems to have swung the other way with the passage of the SonnyBono CopyrightTerm ExtensionAct in 1998 [9]. ) Copyright proponents tried a number of arguments, some that could be called, after Raymond Williams, “residual”:the book is an “autonomous craft-object” [63], for example; or the author is aristocratically“indifferent to personal profit” or, alternatively, “temperamentally unable to sustain economic relations” [91]. But throughout the period studied by McGill, and indeed for some time after, Americans were committed to a populist discourse about intellectual property, in which the benefits accruingto the public trumped the ostensible rights of the individual author. After discussingpublishers’ economic interests, and with a nod to Benedict Anderson, McGill finally concludes that it was a version of thisJacksonian populism that invigorated and sustained the culture of reprinting until the 1850s: The prominence of reprinting in antebellum newspapers offered asyncopationof the nationalimaginarythat fortifiedthe principlesof astates’-rights federalism,p r e viding both the homogeneity crucial to a sense of national belonging and constant reassurancesof a saving heterogeneity. . ..In establishinga publicsphere based on the general accessibility of printed texts but defined...