Modern authorship and the rise of the 'literary market': Evolution of the literary field in France 1750--1789

This dissertation studies evolving conceptions of authorship in eighteenth-century France, focusing specifically on how the commercialization of the cultural sphere altered writers' understanding of literary practice. Hommes de lettres of the Old Regime have traditionally been considered to have transformed themselves into "modern" authors in their engagements with the book trade, and especially in an embrace of the economic opportunities and rights that allowed them to cast off the shackles of the patronage system in order to become autonomous, free-thinking, and critical. This dissertation, however, begins with the observation that most Enlightenment-era writers did not instinctively perceive in literary commerce a "freer" alternative to the Classical careers that they still overwhelmingly pursued. Indeed, more than economic compensation, writers sought validation and legitimization. Hence, before turning to the book trade, writers first had to conceive of it as a field in which such validation could be acquired, and in which, therefore, an authorial identity might be constructed. That is, they had first to transform this artisanal sphere into a properly literary market.;This dissertation offers an account of the transformation of authorship that emphasizes this conceptual evolution. It explores the ways in which writers understood and represented the changing conditions of literary practice, as these conditions were altered by the expanding commercial print sector. It contends, however, that these changes were not perceived directly. Instead, writers indirectly represented the commercialization of literature through its effects on the traditional cultural practices, institutions, and beliefs, which invariably remained the focus of their attention. Thus, rather than the rise of a new order of literary activity, writers fixed upon the collapse of the old order: the decline of patronage, the ineffectiveness of the State to cope with the growth in clandestine publishing, and the incapacity of the official pension and academic system to absorb the mass of writers drawn to Paris by the lure of a literary life. Together, these disparate discourses provided an intellectual framework in which a coherent and modern understanding of authorship came to be articulated, along with a conception of the modern cultural field as, above all, a literary market.