“On the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,” reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical books. I demonstrate that some of the most lasting “steady sellers” in literary history—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote —owe their fame and endurance to cheap trans-Atlantic abridgments and the poor, Black, female, juvenile and otherwise marginalized readers whose growing demand kept them steadily in print. From chapbook abridgments of Robinson Crusoe pitched to working class readers, to toy book adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress for young girls, to illustrated, third-person, single volume adaptations of Pamela that subtly reorient the narrative toward questions of interracial sexual violence, and Jacksonian-era political cartoons satirizing Don Quixote, examples and invocations of these stories in early U.S. print culture suggest that the novel’s literary and material coherence was being vigorously renegotiated against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse print marketplace. We see this conflict most clearly in many of the defining American literary works of the nineteenth-century, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World(1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). Each of these works dramatizes the divergent interpretations present in the print histories of steady sellers in ways that center the experiences of marginalized readers. In bringing together the uneven circulation histories of steady sellers and the formation of U.S. literary culture, this project aims to challenge critical orthodoxies about the rise of the novel and acknowledge the vital role that poor, female, Black, and juvenile readers played in the formation, negotiation, and contestation of literary canons. / 2024-11-03T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45301 |
| Date | 03 November 2022 |
| Creators | Gowen, Emily T. |
| Contributors | Rezek, Joseph, Lee, Maurice |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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