Cheap Poe

This paper examines an overlooked but critical feature of the antebellum era’s publishing economy: the influence wielded by seemingly worthless literary matter. In part, this worthless matter was comprised of any unwanted,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines an overlooked but critical feature of the antebellum era’s publishing economy: the influence wielded by seemingly worthless literary matter. In part, this worthless matter was comprised of any unwanted, unsaleable text, as when a publisher tells a would-be poet, “We have no end to poetry sent to us for nothing and it is ridiculous to talk of buying it.” In another sense, the terminology of worthless matter extended to text that did not fall under U.S. copyright protection and that presented a redundancy of content. Almost all scholars of U.S. publishing take these descriptions of valuelessness as accurately indicative of inert economic zones for writers, sites of “surplus” where the sheer availability of a product made it impossible for local writers to sell their works to publishers. By contrast, I look at these instances of worthlessness as potentially sites of effacement, where intellectual labour is prevented from signifying as work that requires compensation. The key to understanding how this process worked, I suggest, lies in the frequency with which text in U.S. legal and publishing discourse, was figured as a worthless ecological property: as “wild fields,” to quote a famous anti-copyright text. In this paper, I turn to the work of Marxist environmentalist Jason W. Moore to retheorize literary “valuelessness” as a site analogous to what Moore calls “cheap nature,” where seemingly valueless and autonomous ecological phenomena (flowing water, wild grass) are invisibly conscripted to perform “unpaid work/energy” for capitalistic economic systems. I focus on languages of ecological plenty in copyright debates in Poe’s circle, with emphasis on Poe’s essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House.” These indicate the extent to which literary worthlessness was tied not to “surplus” but to a capitalistic publishing regime engaged in the transformation of intellectual content into forms of cheap matter that defied standards of exchange.