Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market by David Dowling (PhDEngl’95)

As the market revolution of the 1840s and 1850s swept the United States, the world of literature confronted for the first time the gaudy glare of commercial culture.  Dowling explores this time when many authors faced a crisis in self-definition and examines how three sets of authors—Harriet Wilson and Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman and Rebecca Harding Davis and Herman Melville—engaged with and transformed the book market.  This book provides an important contribution to our understanding of print culture and literary work.

University of Iowa Press, 2009; 226 pages; ISBN 1587297841