Figures Of Speech

Chronicles the emergence of a literary marketplace in which writers could hope to place their work

How five representative American authors responded to the demands of the literary marketplace is the theme of this surprisingly timely study. Emily Dickinson scorned the commercial aspects of writing, yet, in Wilson's controversial view, she was ultimately a crea ture of the marketplace, defining herself against its criteria, striking poses that were at bottom conventional. Ben Franklin, publicist and self-promoter, disguised his attacks on patronage and power in gentle humor, parable and anecdote. Wilson, a Smith professor of history, draws sharp profiles of Emerson, who idealized the "poet-scholar" into a harmless custodian of high principles, and of crusader William Lloyd Garrison who filled his abolitionist newspaper with a projection of himself as lone, defiant individual against a corrupt world. Wilson shows perceptively how Washington Irving's best tales mirrored his traumatic attempt to achieve vocational autonomy. These five careers speak volumes about the marketplace todayits sham promise of a limitless audience versus the ineffectual status to which most writers are reduced.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With wit, grace, and intelligence, Wilson presents successive portraits of Franklin, Irving, Garrison, Emerson, and Dickinson as representative writers, responding to the new literary marketplace by deliberately or unwittingly embracing a new definition of the space between the private soul and the public personality. Wilson argues that the modern author becomes in a literal sense "a figure of speech"--a projected persona that is both a buffer of self-defense and a producer of commodities to an anonymous market. Wilson's line of argument is lively and subtle, his readings of the lives and works of these writers fresh and provocative, and his sense of the radically changing economic literary situation between 1750 and 1850 paramount. Highly recommended.
- Earl Rovit, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.