The Literary Market

The Literary Market
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A central theme in the history of Old Regime authorship highlights the opportunities offered by a growing book trade to writers seeking to free themselves from patrons and live «by the pen.» Accounts of this passage from patronage to market have explored in far greater detail the opportunities themselves—the rising sums paid by publishers and the progression of laws protecting literary property—than how and why writers would have seized on them, no doubt because the choice to do so has seemed an obvious or natural one for writers assumed to prefer economic self-sufficiency over elite protection. In The Literary Market , Geoffrey Turnovsky claims that there was nothing obvious or natural about the choice. Writers had been involved in commercial book publication since the earliest days of the printing press, yet had not necessarily linked these activities with their freedom to think and write. The association of autonomy and professionalism was forged, not given. Analyzing the literary market as a key articulation of the association, Turnovsky explores how in eighteenth-century polemics a rhetoric of commercial authorship came to signify independence for intellectuals. He finds the roots of the connection not in the claims of entrepreneurial writers to rights and income but in a world to which that of the modern author has been contrasted: the aristocratic culture of the seventeenth century. Aristocratic culture, he argues, generated a disparaging view of the professional author as one defined by activities tainting him or her as greedy and arrogant and therefore unworthy of protection and socially isolated. The Literary Market examines the story of the «birth of the author» in terms of the revalorization of this negative trope in Enlightenment-era debates about the radically changing role of writers in society.

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Geoffrey Turnovsky. The Literary Market

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The Literary Market

Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime

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In either case, the intersection of authorship with the privilège system did not manifest the professionalization of literary activities, as many literary histories assume. On the contrary, Charpentier tells another story in which Georges de Scudéry turns to the mechanism in an effort to bolster— perhaps to fabricate—an image of himself as a retired soldier devoting his idle hours to poetry rather than as a writer earning a living from his plays: “Scudéry went to Saint Germain in order to have a privilège issued in his name, in which he has the King say that he commanded Royal Troupes, whereas truthfully, he has never commanded any troupes other than those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, and a few other troupes of provincial actors.”69 The privilège pointed in a wholly different direction, and indeed to quite another cultural reality of which the images of Corneille’s involvement in commercial publication might also be a reflection: not the slow progress of the writer toward professional independence but the evolving stakes of literary legitimacy in the 1630s, in the context of what Alain Viala called “the first literary field.”70

This reality is characterized at least in part by two decisive developments. On one hand, we have what might be called a socialization of intellectual practices epitomized by the emergence of distinctly social qualities like politeness and honnêteté as essential criteria for the evaluation of writers and their works. More exactly, this socialization was an “aristocratization” of letters, with “société” understood in the seventeenth-century meaning recorded by the dictionary of the Académie française, which accentuates the pleasure of leisured interactions and the exclusivity of elite gatherings.71 The process was thus one of the integration of writers into the networks and values of social elites, a process mediated by what Viala calls “institutions of literary life,” such as the Académie, court patronage, and salons. These and other similar bodies offered privileged venues and mechanisms for introducing gens de lettres and their writings into “the Court and high society,” where both authors and their productions would be judged according to emerging worldly criteria.72 Charles Sorel offers an allegorical account of this “New Parnassus,” describing the Muses leaving “their rustic caves for golden palaces where they frequently lived, having been received by the nobility of the age.” Apollo abandoned Pegasus, “an old horse” and “hideous beast,” for a stylish “Carriage.”73

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