{"id":17953,"date":"2021-05-21T12:27:19","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T16:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/?post_type=profile&p=17953"},"modified":"2021-05-21T12:27:19","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T16:27:19","slug":"emily-gowen","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/profiles\/emily-gowen\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Gowen"},"content":{"rendered":"
On the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
My dissertation project,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cOn the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,\u201d reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical\u00a0texts and their readers.\u00a0I demonstrate that the most lasting \u201csteady sellers\u201d in literary history\u2014John Bunyan\u2019s\u00a0The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress (1678), Daniel Defoe\u2019s\u00a0Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson\u2019s\u00a0Pamela (1740), and Miguel de Cervantes\u2019s\u00a0Don Quixote (1605; translated by Tobias Smollett, 1755)\u2014owe their fame and endurance to their recirculation among\u00a0readers disempowered along lines of race, gender, age, and economic status, but who, thanks to the expansion of print and literacy education in the first half of the nineteenth-century, had new kinds of access to and influence over the literary marketplace. I am especially interested in how newcomers to the reading public interpreted these old-world narratives, and in what ways their responses to and appropriations of these stories shaped the formation of the nineteenth-century\u2019s retrospective assembly of a novelistic genealogy.\u00a0But these readers didn\u2019t typically encounter steady sellers in the material forms that most of us think of when we think of novels. Instead, they often encountered adaptations, abridgments, and excerpts of these works in chapbooks, tracts, and pamphlets, shrunken into pocket editions, squeezed into newspaper columns and almanacs, or rewritten as\u00a0didactic poems. Some\u00a0versions\u00a0were richly illustrated, others were stripped of their original paratextual apparatus, and some were packaged in commercial or educational series with extensive appendices full of advertisements for other books.\u00a0Many readers would encounter any given story in multiple formats and iterations throughout their lives and bring to each successive encounter their existing and increasingly layered interpretive memories. When American readers encountered novelistic steady sellers in the antebellum print public sphere, this is to say, they encountered them as multiple, mutable, and enmeshed in a media landscape defined by the commingling and proliferation of material forms.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Among the many American readers whose literary lives were shaped by the heterogeneous materiality of steady sellers in antebellum print were those who would go on to become important authors in their own right.\u00a0<\/span>I thus read<\/span>\u00a0Herman Melville\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Moby Dick<\/span>\u00a0(1851), Susan Warner\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Wide, Wide World<\/span>\u00a0(1850), Harriet Jacobs\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl<\/span>\u00a0(1861), and Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Huckleberry Finn<\/span>\u00a0(1884) in terms of their engagement with the contested circulation and reception histories of the steady sellers described above.\u00a0<\/span>Taken together, these four works\u2019 invocations of novelistic steady sellers mark both a claiming of their own place in the evolving transatlantic literary genealogy and a recognition that that very genealogy remains in flux, open to the transformations, subversions, and perversions of a heterogeneous print public sphere. For Melville, Jacobs, Warner, and Twain, the democratization of literacy and literature afford certain opportunities for resistance, but the novel\u2019s mutability at the hands of printers, publishers, booksellers and readers is not always a cause for optimism. The continued circulation and reception of canonical steady sellers dramatizes the problem posed by print\u2019s simultaneous fixity and elasticity, its ability to preserve as well as its capacities for renovation. The contested reprinting history of novelistic steady sellers in the nineteenth century United States reveals the limitations of both regenerative and conservative notions of print\u2019s epistemological functions, limitations which all four authors recognized and theorized, even as they submitted their own masterpieces to the juggernaut of nineteenth century print.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":16661,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17955,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/17953\/revisions\/17955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}