Poe, Authorship, and the Literary Marketplace

Poe, Authorship, and the Literary Marketplace

By the time of his death, Edgar Allan Poe had worked as poet, fiction writer, essayist, editor, reviewer, and proofreader. Although he had labored in various part-time and full-time positions in the antebellum publishing industry, no position was permanent or secure. Poe had to support himself entirely by his writing, and struggled constantly against poverty. His professional career was dominated by editorial drudgery, financial hardship, and lack of literary appreciation. Like other nineteenth-century romantic writers, Poe also had to deal with the problem of writing for the growing mass audience. Poe was caught between the romantic conception of the gentleman author and the dependence for a livelihood on the reading public whose preferences governed the literary market. In this paper, I will challenge the long-standing image of Poe as a romantic aesthete separated from commercial and professional pressures of the antebellum publishing culture, by exploring the intricate connection between his literary texts and publishing environment which was marked by economic conflicts and the rise of a mass audience. In line with the recent critical trend for studying how market forces shape the profession of authorship, I intend to examine Poe"s "Hop-Frog," "Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House" and "Anastatic Printing," as representative texts that reflect the authorial frustration, predicament, and hatred against the servitude to the literary institutions of the nineteenth century.

By the time of his death, Edgar Allan Poe had worked as poet, fiction writer, essayist, editor, reviewer, and proofreader. Although he had labored in various part-time and full-time positions in the antebellum publishing industry, no position was permanent or secure. Poe had to support himself entirely by his writing, and struggled constantly against poverty. His professional career was dominated by editorial drudgery, financial hardship, and lack of literary appreciation. Like other nineteenth-century romantic writers, Poe also had to deal with the problem of writing for the growing mass audience. Poe was caught between the romantic conception of the gentleman author and the dependence for a livelihood on the reading public whose preferences governed the literary market. In this paper, I will challenge the long-standing image of Poe as a romantic aesthete separated from commercial and professional pressures of the antebellum publishing culture, by exploring the intricate connection between his literary texts and publishing environment which was marked by economic conflicts and the rise of a mass audience. In line with the recent critical trend for studying how market forces shape the profession of authorship, I intend to examine Poe"s "Hop-Frog," "Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House" and "Anastatic Printing," as representative texts that reflect the authorial frustration, predicament, and hatred against the servitude to the literary institutions of the nineteenth century.