Abstract
This chapter offers a socio-literary analysis of the collaboration of two US abolitionist authors and their British publisher in the revolutionary nineteenth century. Highlighting the relationality of literary dissent and publication processes, the analysis relies on Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural production. It describes the connections between a publisher’s economic and institutional concerns and the literary work done by politically motivated authors. Their collaboration exemplifies the overlaps of art and economy in the realm of political literature. Here, political engagement blurs and enhances the tenets of literary autonomy, but also affects a publisher’s mercantile interests. A content analysis of select passages from Brown’s Clotel and Pennington’s The Fugitive Blacksmith further illuminates the link between literature, politics and economy.
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Drescher, M.R. (2016). The Publishing of Protest: Brown, Pennington, and Gilpin’s Network of Dissent. In: Arapoglou, E., Kalogeras, Y., Nyman, J. (eds) Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56834-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56834-2_4
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