This study offers a new reading of the development of modern authorship in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, through a detailed reexamination of one of the central mythologies of this evolution: the author's passage from dependence on patronage to the autonomy of the market.

The Literary Market
Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime

Geoffrey Turnovsky

2009 | 280 pages | Cloth $59.95
Literature
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Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I. WRITING, PUBLISHING AND LITERARY IDENTITY IN THE "PREHISTORY OF DROIT D'AUTEUR"
Introduction: The Story of a Transition: When and how did writers become "modern"?
1. Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnête Publication
2. The Paradoxes of Enlightenment Publishing

PART II. THE LITERARY MARKET: THE MAKING OF A MODERN CULTURAL FIELD
Introduction: Reconsidering the Alternative
3. "Living By the Pen": Mythologies of Modern Authorial Autonomy
4. Economic Claims and Legal Battles: Writers Turn to the Market
5. The Reality of a New Cultural Field: The Case of Rousseau

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements