From Patronage to the Mass Market: Institutionalizing Literary Knowledge Cultures in the 19th-Century United States

这个合作研究项目调查了19世纪美国文学中制度化知识和中心发展之间的联系。该项目绕过了更传统的文学分期形式，因为它专注于逐步专业化的图书市场，高等教育设施和文化赞助模式之间的多重联系。这一观点导致了一个双重的研究议程。一方面，该项目试图通过研究整个世纪美国允许、促进和禁止文学参与的制度条件，来追踪美国文学民族主义的出现和多样化。只要作者能够参与国家赞助或私人赞助并从中获利，美国文学就获得了相关性和文化权威。文学权威往往直接产生于教育、知识和商业之间的社会制度保护模式。另一方面，该项目结合了当代文学研究中的社会学方法，在所谓的“制度转向”之后，历史和认识论为导向的奖学金。这样一来，塑造了19世纪美国文学大部分内容的文学专业化的动力，似乎与文化知识的形式及其制度环境有着更直接的关系。为了说明这种方法的实际后果，拟议的子项目围绕两个特定的文学活动领域，一个位于19世纪10年代和19世纪20年代，第二个大约在19世纪世纪之交。在第一个领域的中心是马萨诸塞州研究所，这是一个由图书馆、博物馆和专业组织组成的国家资助的公司，通过它，美国出生的作家在创作具有民族特色的文学作品时得到了支持。研究建立这种设施和赞助商网络的尝试，将有助于揭示政治与文化之间的密切关系，这种关系为19世纪30年代和40年代许多更广泛研究的文学民族主义话语做好了准备。调查的第二个领域是致力于形式的文学知识，并通过大众营销的期刊在19世纪世纪末，其中包括妇女的家庭杂志，世界主义，芒西的，麦克卢尔的和有色人种的美国杂志。这些期刊有广泛的目标受众，特别是迎合日益增长的“专业管理阶层”，他们利用这些场所作为文化和商业自我授权的手段。对这本小说的分析与单一的规范文学从业者没有那么直接的关系，而是为了揭示研究不足的体裁、风格和写作格式，这些体裁、风格和写作格式通过在这些杂志上的发行推动了文学领域的专业化。

This collaborative research project investigates the nexus between sites of institutionalized knowledge and central developments within 19th-century American literature. The project circumnavigates more traditional forms of literary periodization in that it focuses on the multiple connections between a gradually professionalized book market, facilities of higher learning, and modes of cultural patronage. This perspective results in a twofold research agenda. On the one hand, the project seeks to trace the emergence and diversification of US-American literary nationalism by looking at the institutional conditions that allowed, promoted, and prohibited literary participation in the US throughout the 19th century. American literature gained relevance and cultural authority whenever authors could partake in and profit from state-sponsored or private forms of patronage. Literary authority often resulted directly from socio-institutional modes of protection that occurred at the interface of education, knowledge, and commerce. On the other hand, the project combines sociological approaches within contemporary literary studies in the wake of the so-called ‘institutional turn’ with historically and epistemologically oriented scholarship. That way, the dynamics of literary professionalization that shaped larger parts of 19th-century US literature will appear related more directly to forms of cultural knowledge and their institutional settings. In order to illustrate the practical consequences of this approach, the proposed subprojects center around two specific fields of literary activity, one situated in the 1810s and 1820s, the second at around the turn of the 19th century. At the center of the first field stands the Massachusetts Institution, a state-sponsored corporation of libraries, museums, and professional organizations through which American-born authors were to be supported in their endeavors to produce nationally specific literature. Studying the attempts to establish this network of facilities and sponsors will shed light on the intimate relationship between politics and culture that prepared many of the more extensively researched discourses of literary nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s. The second field of inquiry is devoted to forms of literary knowledge that took shape in and through mass-marketed periodicals at the end of the 19th century, among them The Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, McClure's und The Colored American Magazine. These periodicals had a broad target audience and catered in particular to a growing „professional-managerial class“ which used these venues as a means of cultural and commercial self-authorization. The analysis of this novel print public is less-directly related to singular canonical literary practitioners and is instead meant to uncover under-researched genres, styles, and formats of writing that fueled the professionalization of the literary field through their circulation in these magazines.