Revised Pages Proofs of Genius Revised Pages editorial theory and literary criticism George Bornstein, Series Editor Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, edited by George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams Contemporary German Editorial Theory, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, by Peter Stoicheff Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, by Marta L. Werner Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, Third Edition, by Peter L. Shillingsburg The Literary Text in the Digital Age, edited by Richard J. Finneran The Margins of the Text, edited by D. C. Greetham A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, edited by Lawrence S. Rainey Much Labouring: The Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books, by David Holdeman Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning, by Peter L. Shillingsburg The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, edited by George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Laȝamon, by Elizabeth J. Bryan Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, by Nicholas Frankel Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, by William W. E. Slights The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen, by John Bryant Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann by Dirk Van Hulle The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, edited by Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young The Texuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose, by Tim Hunt Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age, by Amanda Gailey Revised Pages Proofs of Genius Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age Amanda Gailey University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © by Amanda Gailey 2015 Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dcbooks.13607059.0001.001 ISBN 978– 0- 472– 07275- 0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978– 0- 472– 05275- 2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978– 0- 472– 12126– 7 (e- book) Revised Pages For Leo who dislikes sentimental dedications Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments I am indebted to many people who were generous with their time and sup- port as I wrote this book. Kenneth M. Price offered crucial advice in the early stages, and he and Susan Belasco read the whole draft, making in- valuable suggestions. George Bornstein offered a careful reading and en- couragement. Thomas Dwyer, formerly of the University of Michigan Press, encouraged me to expand the scope of the book to its current form. My experience years ago working on the Whitman Archive first led me to think about the history and significance of editing, and the Archive’s resources were later critical to thinking through Whitman’s complex relationship to literary collection. The staff and affiliated faculty of the Center for Digi- tal Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln have been continually helpful in consulting about digital editing. I especially thank my friends and colleagues Elizabeth Lorang, Andrew Jewell, Brett Barney, and Katherine Walter for their support. Portions of some of these chapters were presented at the Society for Tex- tual Scholarship, where I received valuable feedback and encouragement: in particular, Martha Nell Smith and Peter Shillingsburg offered comments and queries that helped shape the direction of the chapter on Cold War editing. Additionally, Bethany Nowviskie, Amy Earhart, Ed Folsom, and Melissa Homestead answered crucial questions, and Jerome McGann made very helpful suggestions that strengthened the final chapter in particular. My readers for the University of Michigan Press gave extremely helpful feedback. The Peoria Public Library sent me scans of a fascinating docu- ment in their special collections, and Leo D. Blake of the Walt Whitman House sent me materials that helped me understand Whitman’s difficulties with his tomb. Revised Pages viii acknowledgments Most of all, I thank my daughter, Millie, and son, Ned, who patiently cooperated as their mother finished this book; my parents, Jerry and Vicky Gailey, who were continually supportive; and my husband, Leo Iacono, who read it again and again. Revised Pages Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. America Collecting Itself: National Identity and Intellectual Property in the Early Republic 10 Chapter 2. Dickinson’s Remains 33 Chapter 3. Whitman’s Shrines 55 Chapter 4. Cold War Editing and the Rise of the “American Literature Industry” 83 Chapter 5. The Death of the Author Has Been Greatly Exaggerated 107 Notes 141 Index 157 Revised Pages Revised Pages Introduction This book originates from my interest in the history of literary editing, par- ticularly in how it has shaped my own field of American literature. How has the way we organize, package, and represent literature impacted the cul- ture in which it is produced? The subject of editing seems straightforward, and to its critics even dry,1 but editorial choices have stealthily shaped the American literary canon for centuries, forging authorial legacies, producing regional and national propaganda, and generally working as a determinant for what and how we consider American literature. There are many kinds of editing, of course, including commercial editors who work with authors to publish their texts2 in magazines or books for the first time, consultants who improve the readability of a work, scholars who treat historical materi- als, and so on— editing is really a broad term that includes a range of labor that has grown increasingly specialized, from the early stationers who edit- ed, printed, and sold books in one shop to the highly segmented scholarly and commercial markets of today. But through the radical transformations of the American literary marketplace from the eighteenth to the twenty- first century, one kind of editing has held firm as the gold standard, as the way we assert the lasting value of an author and his or her works within the canon: the creation of collected editions. From the earliest days of the Republic when printer Francis Bailey helped produce a collected edition of Philip Freneau, “the Poet of the Revo- lution,” to the digital age, when scholars at research universities collaborate to create a dynamic and ever-gr owing collected edition of the works of Walt Whitman, collected editions have powerfully but for the most part silently helped shape the way authorship and textuality have been viewed in the American cultural imaginary. This book examines how collected editions Revised Pages 2 proofs of genius have helped shape American literature, erecting monuments to individual people on the cultural landscape. My study does not attempt to be compre- hensive, but instead examines several important periods and cases in the development of the genre within the American national context. In doing so it looks at how representative authors, editors, publishers, and readers have used the collected edition to build national and regional cultural iden- tity, to assert intellectual property, to market books, to construct feminized and private literary marketplaces, to manage authorial reputation, to influ- ence the humanities, and to construct the field of digital literary scholar- ship. A more encyclopedic, international examination of the collected edi- tion— a massive undertaking— would also be valuable to book history, but my focus on American collected editions allows this study to more clearly examine the way the genre has functioned within a specific national liter- ary economy, helping to forge an American literary canon and providing an aspirational standard for professional and amateur authors, as well as publishers and editors, as those roles were becoming defined and redefined. This introduction will describe the book’s working definition of “collected edition,” discuss how the concept of genius provided a motivation for many of the volumes, and offer a brief overview of how the collected edition has helped build a national literary identity. 1. Defining “Collected Edition” Historical shifts in the genre of the collected edition demand that any wide- ranging study work with a flexible understanding of the form. Except when they provide illuminating examples, I have omitted collected editions of theo- logical, political, and historical materials, limiting this study to literary texts. Even with that limitation, I find “collected edition” tricky to define. Today we think of collected editions as complete collections of a single author’s writ- ings (with “writings” itself being a fraught category with nebulous bound- aries) professionally published after his or her death. But almost none