Conventional literary history has virtually ignored the role of newspaper syndicates in publishing some of the most famous nineteenth-century writers. Stephen Crane, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain were among those who offered their early fiction to 'Syndicates', firms which subsequently sold the work to newspapers across America for simultaneous, first-time publication. This newly decentralised process profoundly affected not only the economics of publishing, but also the relationship between authors, texts and readers. In the first full-length study of this publishing phenomenon, Charles Johanningsmeier evaluates the unique site of interaction syndicates held between readers and texts.

This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.

Using the lens of business history to contextualize the development of an American literary tradition, Truth Stranger than Fiction shows how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism, which remains one of the most significant genres of writing in the United States. More specifically, Truth Stranger than Fiction traces the influences of generic conventions popularized in slave narratives - such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body - in later realist writings. As it unfolds, Truth Stranger than Fiction poses and explores a set of questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the United States from 1830-1930 by focusing on the evolving trend of literary realism. Beginning with the question, 'How might slave narratives - heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker - have influenced the development of American Literature?' the book develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.

This book examines literary authorship in the twentieth century and covers such topics as publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality.

Literature and the Marketplace addresses one of the great ironies of nineteenth-century British and American literature: the fact that authors of that era, in voicing their alienation from middle-class readers, paradoxically gave expression to feelings of alienation felt by those same readers. As William G. Rowland Jr. points out, romantic writers "thought of the market as conspiring against 'imagination' (Blake) or 'telling the truth' (Melville)" and consequently felt frustrated with literary institutions. Yet their "frustrations, " writes Rowland, "helped to energize romantic work and explain its subsequent and continuing appeal." The book opens with a survey of reading publics in Great Britain and the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. Rowland then presents individual writers-including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, and Emerson-and their relations to their readers. Finally, Rowland shows how the idea of genius was developed by writers as different as Coleridge, Blake, Whitman, and Dickinson and how that idea evolved as an antidote to the commercial literary marketplace of the nineteenth century. A wide-ranging and provocative book, Literature and the Marketplace describes the relations between important British and American authors and the audiences and publishing industries of their era-relations that were troubled, uncertain, and remarkably productive of literature. William G. Rowland Jr. is the Director of Studies at Hereford Residential College, University of Virginia. This is his first book.

Using the lens of business history to contextualize the development of an American literary tradition, Truth Stranger than Fiction shows how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism, which remains one of the most significant genres of writing in the United States. More specifically, Truth Stranger than Fiction traces the influences of generic conventions popularized in slave narratives - such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body - in later realist writings. As it unfolds, Truth Stranger than Fiction poses and explores a set of questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the United States from 1830-1930 by focusing on the evolving trend of literary realism. Beginning with the question, 'How might slave narratives - heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker - have influenced the development of American Literature?' the book develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.