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).

Prior to the Civil War, publishing in America underwent a transformation from a genteel artisan trade supported by civic patronage and religious groups to a thriving, cut-throat national industry propelled by profit. Literary Dollars and Social Sense represents an important chapter in the historical experience of print culture, it illuminates the phenomenon of amateur writing and delineates the access points of the emerging mass market for print for distributors consumers and writers. It challenges the conventional assumptions that the literary public had little trouble embracing the new literary marketing that emerged at mid-century. The book uncover the tensions that author's faced between literature's role in the traditional moral economy and the lure of literary dollars for personal gain and fame. This book marks an important example in how scholars understand and conduct research in American literature.

What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central to The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, an ambitious nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Volume five traces print's role in the lives of a wide variety of people who settled-or who were displaced or forcibly transported by settlers-in middle North America, from colonial beginnings through the mid-nineteenth-century proliferation of industrially-produced imprints until 1860, when the Civil War disrupted longstanding patterns. While the volume takes account of emerging technological and economic developments in production and distribution, it nevertheless through its focus on readers emphasizes surprising continuities over the longue duree of centuries. Forty-one contributors from across disciplines consider either literary practices of diverse groups or specific genres of popular print passing through people's hands, which included advertisements, almanacs, captivity narratives, ephemera, lithographs, magazines, newspapers, nonfiction, novels, pamphlets, poetry, and slave narratives. In articulating imprint use and genre among groups ranging from free and enslaved blacks to native peoples to women of all races, contributors provide an unusually well-rounded view of print's everyday meanings. Because people often derived those meanings in relation to scribal production and oral communication, the diaries and letters they penned and transcriptions of words they spoke provide much of the book's evidence. The volume ultimately reorients the study of popular print culture in the early US from locally produced printed texts aimed at national readerships to the practices of readers who engaged the broad universe of imprints - not always American-authored-available to them.

This book explores an important boundary between history and literature: the antebellum reading public for books written by Americans. Zboray describes how fiction took root in the United States and what literature contributed to the readers' sense of themselves. He traces the rise of fiction as a social history centered on the book trade and chronicles the large societal changes shaping, circumscribing, and sometimes defining the limits of the antebellum reading public. A Fictive People explodes two notions that are commonplace in cultural histories of the nineteenth century: first, that the spread of literature was a simple force for the democratization of taste, and, second, that there was a body of nineteenth-century literature that reflected a "nation of readers." Zboray shows that the output of the press was so diverse and the public so indiscriminate in what it would read that we must rethink these conclusions. The essential elements for the rise of publishing turn out not to be the usual suspects of rising literacy and increased schooling. Zboray turns our attention to the railroad as well as private letter writing to see the creation of a national taste for literature. He points out the ambiguous role of the nineteenth-century school in encouraging reading and convincingly demonstrates that we must look more deeply to see why the nation turned to literature. He uses such data as sales figures and library borrowing to reveal that women read as widely as men and that the regional breakdown of sales focused the power of print.