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" “One great moral enterprise”: *Literature, *education, and the New England marketplace, 1830–1845 "
Derek Andrew Pacheco
B. L. Packer
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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53647
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TL23601
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3251445
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| Main Entry
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Derek Andrew Pacheco
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| Title & Author
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“One great moral enterprise”: *Literature, *education, and the New England marketplace, 1830–1845\ Derek Andrew Pacheco
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| College
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University of California, Los Angeles
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| Date
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2006
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2006
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| Page No
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250
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| Abstract
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This project investigates the intersections of literature, education, and the marketplace in antebellum New England. The idea of authorship was at an intermediate stage, shifting between an older notion of writing as a largely amateur enterprise undertaken by the gentlemanly classes as an expression of civic duty, and the more modern possibility of a professionalized, commercialized, mass-market career. Writers and publishers alike came to see great potential in the educational literature market, believing it might be an entry point for those seeking prominence within what Horace Mann called the "Alexandrian library" of antebellum print culture. Mann's crusade for education offers a particularly relevant context for understanding an important group of New England writers, collaborators, and "transcendental circle" of friends at the center or this study---Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Margaret Fuller---as they attempted to carve a niche for themselves as authors in the protean realm of the antebellum marketplace. Through examining the strategies adopted by these writers during the late 1830s and early 1840s, this study argues that they came to see in education, and in a widespread ferment for educational reform, a means to establish themselves as popular authors while at the same time validating literary work as a profession. These writers harnessed the innovative media of popular education---in the form of children's literature, libraries, conversation classes, and periodicals---as engines of literary production and the means for creating marketable literary commodities. Popular education, and the organs of its dissemination, became a way for them to reconcile deeply-held democratic sentiments about the purpose of authorship with concerns over a literary market that fostered all sorts of competition from other texts and writers, as well as the fastidious demands of a growing reading public. Thus, while they, like most antebellum writers, aimed to do good, they also felt justified in demanding a share of the profits increasingly available in America's burgeoning print economy, and often could not help feeling a twinge of bitterness if such rewards did not materialize.
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| Subject
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Language, literature and linguistics; Education; Fuller, Margaret; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Literature; Mann, Horace; Marketplace; New England; Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer; American literature; 0591:American literature
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B. L. Packer
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University of California, Los Angeles
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