Book Review

The question of "what is an author," as Michel Foucault's famous essay made abundantly clear, yields no easy answer among readers or writers themselves and further complicates the tasks of historians and literary critics who study the traffic in ideas between them. In The Transformation of Authorship in America, Grantland S. Rice poses this question in ways that enliven much of the recent scholarship and debate on the "public sphere" and "print culture" in early America. From the dissenting writers of mid-seventeenth-century New England to the first American novelists of the late eighteenth century, Rice contends that a "long and indigenous tradition of immanent social criticism" defined and distinguished American authorship (11). With admirable subtlety and nuance, he charts the transformation of the author's vocation, prospects, and image under the pressures of political faction, legal change, and the commercialization of print culture. Ultimately, he suggests that much of the form and content of early American literature can be understood as an attempt to sustain this tradition amidst such pressures.	1
The "author," as Foucault argued, first emerged as an object of legal punishment; texts and discourses began to have "authors" when it became evident that texts and discourses could be transgressive. Following upon this, Rice locates the origin of American authorship in censorship and not, as the prevailing libertarian interpretation would suggest, in the development of a free press and the concept of free expression as an individual right prior to government. In the opening chapter, he demonstrates that Puritan divines and the dissenters whose writings they suppressed shared an awareness of the power of print to transform the social order. But where the Puritan orthodoxy saw authors as objects of punishment and texts as technologies of social control, dissenters such as Thomas Maule saw in the (a)vocation of authorship a means for realizing the Puritan ideal of visible sainthood through civic humanist traditions of articulate and participatory citizenship.	2
Emerging from the crucible of censorship, authorship was rhetorically figured as a communicative, intentional, and participatory activity. To author was to speak as, and speak to, the disinterested civic conscience of a community. In the remaining chapters, Rice traces the fate of this conception of authorship. A brief chapter on the Zenger trial contends that the rhetoric of disinterested authorial conscience was appropriated by political factions and a nascent printing industry and put to the service of an interest-group politics that pushed meaningful social criticism and its authors to the margins of the public sphere. In addition, the Zenger trial marked one early episode in the gradual displacement of religious and civic-humanist conceptions of authorship by legal and economic discourses. Crucial to this argument, and of particular interest to legal scholars, is a chapter on the Federal Copyright Act of 1790. In the campaign for author's "rights" and copyright laws, Rice sees the communicative and critical actions of the author being reconfigured as economic and productive. Though he carefully draws out differences between statutory and common law conceptions of literary property, his ultimate contention is that both overwrote civic-humanist ideals of authorship. Statutory approaches defined texts in terms of the utilitarian calculus of the marketplace; the common law equated authorship with possessive individualism. More importantly, Rice demonstrates that even the most ardent advocates of author's rights—Washington Irving, for example—sensed that such rights "signaled a radical redefinition of what it meant to write for a reading public" (70).	3
Chapters on Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry describe varying authorial responses to this emergent free marketplace of ideas. Here Rice offers a corrective to the view that this "republic of letters" was met with unmixed glee and resisted only by embattled elites nostalgic for the hierarchical order of an oral culture. He catalogs the ambivalent responses that an increasingly commodified print culture elicited from Franklin, Crèvecoeur, and Brackenridge. Each writer, of course, struck different bargains with the literary marketplace, but all recognized that the traditional, humanist "author" was being bargained away in the process. Rice interprets their varying authorial stances and textual strategies as attempts to rework and sustain this tradition amidst a democratic reading public weary of high-minded, didactic writing and hungry for novelty and entertainment.	4
The final chapter offers a similar take on the origins of the early American novel. Laying to the side the dominant interpretation of the novel as the literary vehicle of an ascendant middle class, Rice reads the genre as "the literary means of last resort for a tradition of civic authorship facing the vicissitudes posed by the dawning of the age of economic liberalism and mechanical reproduction" (155). No longer confident that they could directly impress moral truths into the minds of readers, authors such as William Hill Brown and Hannah Foster turned to the novel as a way of seducing their audience to virtue—of, as Emily Dickinson would later put it, telling the truth, but telling it slant. It is thus no mere coincidence for Rice that early American novels were so heavily populated with novel-reading seducers and coquettes: the subject matter mirrored the coquettish literary strategy and deportment of the novelist.	5
For Foucault, the transformation of authorship ends in the death of the author. For Rice, it ends in hiding and retreat. Once visible saints before a community of conscience, authors now coyly flirt with the literary marketplace, hinting at social criticism where it can no longer be openly declared. Skeptics might disagree with Rice on the particular forces behind this transformation. At times, he appears to read nineteenth-century phenomena—the development of a political party system, the widespread diffusion of print, the market revolution, the modernization of the common law—back into the eighteenth century. But the larger trajectory mapped in The Transformation of Authorship in America is a clear, original, and compelling one that merits the attention of students of early American culture, society, and political thought.	6
Mark Schmeller University of Chicago

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