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Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson.

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From: The Nation
Date: 19890703
Author:Trachtenberg, Alan

FIGURES OF SPEECH: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, From Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson.

Figures of Speech undertakes to show that certain American writers who portrayed themselves as seekers after truth or as pure artists cannot be taken at their word. They were instead deliberate, knowing and complicit producers for the literary marketplace. What gives this away is precisely those "figures" they fashioned of themselves as dispassionate thinkers or embattled artists. A professor of American history at Smith College and a superb writer, R. Jackson Wilson ...

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