Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860

by Sandra Tomc

Overview

Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that in the United States myths of writerly moodiness, alienation, and irresponsibility predated the development of a commercial arts and entertainment industry and instead of forming a site of rebellion from this industry formed a bedrock for its development. Looking at the careers of a number of early American writers---Joseph Dennie, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Fanny Fern, as well as a host of now forgotten souls who peopled the twilight worlds of hack fiction and industrial literature---this book traces the way in which early nineteenth-century American arts and entertainment systems incorporated writerly eccentricity in their "logical" economic workings, placing the mad, rebellious writer at the center of the industry's productivity and success.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472028429
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	06/19/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	310
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sandra Tomcis Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

1. Anywhere but Here: Provincial Literature and the “Miseries of Literary Men”

2. Personifying Vernacular Eccentricity: Joseph Dennie and the American Lounger

3. “Too Much above the Popular Level to Be Well Paid”: Edgar Allan Poe, His Peers, and the Rewards of Genius

4. An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure

5. “As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum”: The Eccentric Woman Writer

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Sandra Tomc’s original, erudite, lucidly written, and strenuously argued book ... persuasively demonstrates that the eccentric writer was, in fact, central to the industrialization of American literature, less as a reaction or mode of ideological critique than as a fundamentally generative and structuring force."

—Nineteenth-century Literature

— Edward Cahill, Fordham University, Nineteenth-century Literature

"For in almost every analysis Tomc engages in, she reverses our conventional understanding, showing the ways in which rhetorical constructions and economic structures are dynamically and mutually self-defining. The unrelenting counterintuitiveness that enlivens Tomc’s methodological approach to print culture is as exhilarating as it is challenging."

—Early American Literature

— Adam Gordon, Whitman College, Early American Literature

From the Publisher