Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-04, Section: A, page: 1281.

Director: Bryan J. Wolf.

This dissertation examines the significance that three American fiction writers--Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--imaginatively invest in the objects of books and writing as a response to the unfolding economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of early national and antebellum America. Through attention to these writers, the dissertation charts a shifting American mythology and ideology of the medium of print.

The method of this study is both to present the historical record and to provide interpretations of literary texts. The conclusions reached result from intersections and juxtapositions of the two sets of evidence. In particular, the work focuses on certain crucial figurations of textuality that emerged as shared idiosyncracies that together helped form one basis of early national print culture. It also examines how the intersecting phenomena of the market, professionalism, and the concept of the literary imbued the materiality of writing with a social and psychic significance the traces of which remain in present day American culture. Print, the dissertation argues, goes through a delicate process in early national and antebellum America by which it becomes the territory of the personal, private, domestic, and metaphysical. Through the coalescence of several social, economic, and cultural forces, literary materiality emerges as both effete and transcendent, characteristics that remain recognizable in the literary sphere today.