This book explores an important boundary between history and literature: the antebellum reading public for books written by Americans. Zboray describes how fiction took root in the United States and what literature contributed to the readers' sense of themselves. He traces the rise of fiction as a social history centered on the book trade and chronicles the large societal changes shaping, circumscribing, and sometimes defining the limits of the antebellum reading public. A Fictive People explodes two notions that are commonplace in cultural histories of the nineteenth century: first,...

Prior to the Civil War, publishing in America underwent a transformation from a genteel artisan trade supported by civic patronage and religious groups to a thriving, cut-throat national industry propelled by profit. Literary Dollars and Social Sense represents an important chapter in the historical experience of print culture, it illuminates the phenomenon of amateur writing and delineates the access points of the emerging mass market for print for distributors consumers and writers. It challenges the conventional assumptions that the literary public had little trouble embracing the new...

In early nineteenth-century America, the production and commercial distribution of reading matter came face-to-face with social literary practices. As mass readerships emerged, so did a mass authorship grasping after newly available literary dollars. Yet they did not immediately embrace market values. Instead, writers - even heavily promoted literary celebrities -- struggled to preserve some semblance of social sense, rooted in social authorship and dissemination practices. Summoning a host of ordinary Americans' voices in diaries and letters, the Zborays uncover a neglected, yet pivotal...