This study examines the literary career of the eighteenth-century American poet Joel Barlow. Because Barlow, unlike his peers, came to fully embrace print-based methods of authorship and advertising, between 1790-1810 he emerged as the most widely read American poet. Employing a book studies methodology, this project focuses on the publication details surrounding each of Barlow's poems including: his relationships with his publishers, the physical shape and appearance of his works, the cost of those works, how those works were advertised, and the extent of their geographic distribution. The arc of Barlow's career was extraordinary. Barlow's development, his transformation from a standard eighteenth-century club poet who relied on manuscript circulation and oral performance in the 1770s to an international man of letters and a periodical fixture by 1800, highlights the possibilities and limitations of American literary publishing during the early national period. Importantly, Barlow's ability to emphasize, rather than elide, his personal identity in the press, forces scholars to reevaluate their notions of late eighteenth-century republican print culture. Barlow's career also impacts our reading of American literary history. In an age of caution and deference in American poetry, Barlow was driven to maximize his audience, publishing his poems across all price points and in every medium offered by the time. Barlow's efforts at self-promotion, coupled with his staunch republican politics, allowed his poems to take on a life of their own in the era's fiercely partisan press. Thanks to his association with the transatlantic republican movement and radical religious thinkers, this study suggests that poems such as the "Conspiracy of Kings," (1792) "The Hasty Pudding," (1796) and the Columbiad (1807) enjoyed audiences as large and as economically diverse as those of popular fiction. Even in an age marked by the rise of the novel and the beginnings of romanticism, An Ink-Stained Neoclassicist contends that Barlow's proto-mass audience reveals the persistent popularity and cultural importance of neoclassical verse in the intellectual life of many Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century.

La démocratisation de l’écrit dans notre société culturelle moderne a fait que tout un chacun peut se revendiquer auteur. La reconnaissance n’est plus désormais à rechercher à travers la traditionnelle publication chez un éditeur mais à travers l’immatérialité des outils d’auto-édition offerts en ligne. D’une part, avec la phase de désintermédiation qui se joue entre les différents acteurs du secteur littéraire, l’écrivain se passe d’une maison d’édition. L’éditeur disparaît. D’autre part, l’auteur, personnage romantique et emblématique sur lequel le droit d’auteur a été forgé, s’efface progressivement du paysage juridique. Avec l’effacement du mythe est emportée la vision propriétaire des droits d’auteur, au profit de l’utilisateur. L’auteur disparaît. Les nouvelles pratiques de cette société connectée bouleversent le droit et sa capacité d’adaptation. Pourtant le contrat d’édition littéraire, socle de la relation auteur-éditeur, existe bel et bien et constitue le sujet de cette étude. Modèle dominant des contrats d’auteur, l’ambition de cette recherche est d’arriver à saisir à travers cette relation la nature du contrat d’édition et le jeu des nouveaux équilibres posés par l'ère numérique (réforme du Code de propriété intellectuelle), mais aussi de saisir les mutations à la lisière du droit d’auteur qui redéfinissent la possession dans l’ère immatérielle avec les modèles alternatifs du contrat d’édition littéraire (licences libres et creative commons). Les moyens d'y répondre emprunteront à l'analyse juridique mais aussi dans une juste mesure à l'internormativité, qui permettra d'observer le droit avec les yeux du sociologue, de l'économiste et de l'historien / The liberalization of writing in our contemporary cultural society has made it so anyone can now aim for the title of author. The recognition of one’s work is now sought, not through the traditional means of publishing, with the assistance of a professional publisher, but through immaterial processes of self- online publishing. On one hand, thanks to these new means, the author is able to cut the intermediation of the publishing field and to avoid using a professional publishing company. On the other hand, the author, romantic and emblematic character upon whom author’s rights have been forged is fading away from the legal landscape. With the decay of the myth, the ownership conception of author’s rights is taken away by those of the user. The author is fading away. The new customs of our over connected society are dramatically changing law and its ability to adapt. Although, publishing contracts are still a part of the process and are the subject at the heart of this study. The French intellectual property code was able to grant this contract access to the dematerialized world by incorporating the paradigm shift. Main model of publishing contracts, its ambivalent nature is due to the merging of both civil and intellectual property law that can be applied to it. This study aims to capture the true nature of the publishing contract figure, through the relations established between authors and publishers, including their new balance, and also to grasp a full understanding of the mutations surrounding the authors’ rights and that redefine ownership in a now immaterial era through the new alternative means of self-publishing (free licenses and creative commons)