Leon Jackson

Associate Professor

Office: 419 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2108
jacksol@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

B.A. University of Lancaster, 1987
D. Phil. Oxford University, 1994
M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School, 1995

Specialization Areas

Early National and Antebellum Literature
The History of the Book and Authorship

Recently Taught Classes

Engl 287: American Literature
Engl 382: The Enlightenment
Engl 421: American Literature, 1830-1860
Engl 700: Intro to Grad Studies
Engl 744: American Romanticism
Engl 756: History of the Book in America

Current Research Project(s)

I have recently published The Business of Letters (Stanford 2008), a study of authorship in early national and antebellum America that seeks to shift our scholarly focus away from an emphasis on the professionalization of writing and toward a more nuanced and historically grounded understanding of authorial exchange practices. My core argument is that in the early nineteenth century, authorship was transacted not through a single ‘marketplace,’ but rather through multiple economies, each with their own rules, logics, and sometimes even currencies.  I argue, moreover, that the core historical transformation in the economic practice of authorship was not from amateur to professional writing, but from economies characterized by social embeddedness to more impersonal forms of authorial exchange.

My new project, Scarlet Letters, is a cultural history of embarrassment and shame in nineteenth century America.  Drawing on an eclectic variety of sources including city mystery novels, penny papers, blackmail letters, etiquette manuals, educational treatises, private diaries, credit reports, court records, and reported gossip, I try to reconstruct the experience of being-for-others in a world increasingly defined by anonymity and mediated by the printed word.  I continue to pursue my interests in print culture, working at present in two review essays, one on the history of the book and recent studies of antebellum American literature, the other on the ways in which African American Studies and print culture studies have – and have not – intersected.

Publications

The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008).

‘We Won’t Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the Newsboy’s New Year’s Address,’ Common-Place 8 (January 2008).
http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-02/reading/

‘Making Friends at the Southern Literary Messenger’ in An Extensive Republic: Books Culture and Society in the New Nation, ed. Robert Gross and Mary Kelley, Vol. 2, A History of the Book in America (Univ. of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2009).

‘Books and Colleges, 1790-1840,’ (with Dean Grodzins) in An Extensive Republic: Books, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, ed. Robert Gross and Mary Kelley, Vol. 2, A History of the Book in America (Univ. of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2009).

‘“A Species of Literature Almost Beneath Contempt”: Edgar Allan Poe and the World of Literary Competitions,’ in The Other Poe, Ed. James Hutchisson (Newark: Delaware Univ. Press, forthcoming 2009).

‘Historicizing Poe at the Turn of the Century,’ Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 35 (2002): 76-82.

‘“Behold Our Literary Mohawk Poe”:  Literary Nationalism and the ‘Indianation’ of American Culture.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 48 (2002): 97-133.

‘Poe and Print Culture’ Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 33 (Winter, 2001): 1-6.

‘“The Italics are Mine”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Semiotics of Print,’ in Illuminating Letters: Essays on Type Faces and Literary Interpretation, ed. Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 139-161.

Rising Stars and Raging Diseases: The Rhetoric and Reality of Antebellum Canonization,’ Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 25 (2000): 159-176.

‘The Reader Retailored: Thomas Carlyle, His American Audiences, and the Politics of Evidence,’ Book History 2 (1999): 146-172.  Rpt. in Reading Acts: US Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950, ed. Barbara  Ryan and Amy Thomas (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2002), 79-106.

‘Jedidiah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture in New England, 1784-1826,’ Early American Literature 34 (1999): 2-31.

‘The Social Construction of Thomas Carlyle’s New England Reputation, 1834-36,’Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 106 (April, 1996): 167-191.

‘The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard,’ History of Higher Education Annual 15 (1995): 5-49.  Rpt. in The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Geiger (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2000), 46-79.

Recent Presentations

‘Rethinking Artisanal Authorship in Early National America.’  Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Madison, July 2007.

‘“Bid the Vassal Roar”: George Moses Horton and the Aesthetics of Colonization.’ American Literature Association, Boston, May 2007.

“African American Literature and Print Culture,” Modern Language Association Convention, Washington DC, December, 2006.

‘“Something for Something”: Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses and Economies of Obligation.’ Society for Early Americanists, Alexandria, April 2005.

‘Harry Potter and the History of the Book.’ University of South Carolina Honors College, Last Lecture Series, March 2005.

‘Polanyi for Poets, Bourdieu for Bibliographers: Toward a History of Authorial Economics in Nineteenth Century America.’ Junior Faculty Seminar, University of South Carolina, March 2005.

‘Magazine Publishing and Gift Economics in Jacksonian America.’ Society for Historians of the Early Republic, Brown University, July 2004.

‘The Black Bard and the Black Market: Slave Culture, Print Culture, and Authorial Economies in Jacksonian America.’ American Antiquarian Society, November, 2003.

‘The Printer as Author, from Franklin to Whitman.’ University of Virginia, July, 2003.