Literary Dollars and Social Sense - A People's History of the Mass Market Book (Paperback)

In early nineteenth-century America, the production and commercial distribution of reading matter came face-to-face with social literary practices. As mass readerships emerged, so did a mass authorship grasping after newly available literary dollars. Yet they did not immediately embrace market values. Instead, writers - even heavily promoted literary celebrities -- struggled to preserve some semblance of social sense, rooted in social authorship and dissemination practices. Summoning a host of ordinary Americans' voices in diaries and letters, the Zborays uncover a neglected, yet pivotal moment in modern mass-market publishing between its elite-driven past and its corporate-directed future. Literary Dollars & Social Sense shows common Americans apprehending the newly industrialized literary marketplace through their reading and gossiping, addressing it through their writing and editing, and serving it through their vending and distributing. This history encompasses not only popular authorship and dissemination of books, but, as is conventional in history-of-the-book scholarship, all forms of imprints, including newspapers and magazines. literary historicism, the book also offers to general readers renewed faith in literature as something socially valuable beyond--and above--monetary reward. AUTHORBIO: Ronald J. Zboray is Associate Professor of Communication and of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Among his books are A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (Oxford). Mary Saracino Zboray is an independent scholar; she is coauthor, with Ron Zboray, of A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States (Library of Congress).

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	February 2005
First published:	2005
Authors:	Ronald J Zboray • Mary Saracino Zboray
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 21mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	356
ISBN-13:	978-0-415-97248-2
Categories:	Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Media, information & communication industries > Publishing industry
LSN:	0-415-97248-5
Barcode:	9780415972482

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