‘Uncommon Animals’: Making Virtue of Necessity in the Age of Authors

Abstract

The vitriolic splendour of eighteenth-century quarrels between the advocates of a patrician model of the man of letters and their more commercially oriented antagonists has at times distracted us from the complexity and force of the tensions which structured debates within the latter category. This oversight is crucial because the emergence of modern ideals of authorship was less a matter of the victory of one of these definitions over the rest than the product of the friction between competing versions of literary professionalism. One of the lessons of more sociological approaches to book history has been the productive influence of the logic of resentment which structured relations between different positions within the literary field; new definitions of any of the constituent elements of the field (the author, the reading public, literature itself, the book trade, and so on) did not emerge in some pristine form out of a field of vanquished choices (this rather than that idea of what a writer should be) but, more dialectically, out of the play between these alternatives.