Unsettled Literary Institutions in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract This article advances the claim that nineteenth-century American literature is best understood as evolving from a limited patronage system in the 1810 s and 1820 s to a relatively open and expanding commercial literary market around 1900. It combines two narrowly focused inquiries into what we call ‘unsettled literary institutions’, based on evidence from periodical archives and government records. We situate the birth of an American national literature less in the emphatic tradition of subversive individualism and the explicit formal negotiations of American Renaissance authors. Instead, we argue that first attempts to create a genuinely US-based literary infrastructure occurred in a top-down manner, steered by political elites in New England and expressed via projects such as the so-called ‘Massachusetts Institution’. In a second step, the article addresses the magazine revolution of the 1890 s, in which new business and marketing strategies led to an explosion in the print-marketplace. Suddenly confronted with an unprecedented audience size, magazine entrepreneurs tested out new forms and formats for literary writing that led to unique inter-institutional constellations, such as Cosmopolitan magazine’s plan to turn itself into a new type of American university.