Abstract: “The Economy of Letters – Concepts of Literary Value in Romanticism”
The professionalization and commercialization of the book market, and therefore also of literary production, that happened in the course of the eighteenth century established what we might call an “economy of letters”, increasingly supplanting the older notion of the “republic of letters”. This economy can be understood as a complex interplay between three different but related value systems. On the one hand, there is artistic or literary value (the quality of a literary work, how “worthy” it is). But that value does not simply exist, it is attributed through critical judgments, which are made by readers, critics, and institutional structures. The capacity to (successfully) make such attributions depends on another value system, that I have called “critical authority”. Finally, both literary value and the authority or “credit” of the critic to set literary value stand in an uneasy relationship to the vastly differing economic values that literary texts generate by selling (or not). In this paper, I want to take a look at how this three-value-system, the establishment of which I have described in The Emergence of Literary Criticism in 18th-Century Britain, is both entrenched by Romantic media ecologies and challenged by Romantic aesthetics.
Bio: University of Greifswald, Germany
Sebastian Domsch teaches Anglophone literatures at the University of Greifswald. He holds a PhD from Bamberg University, and a Habilitation from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. His major fields of interest are Romantic literature and 18th-century literature, contemporary literature and culture, graphic novels, and the history and theory of literary criticism. He is the author of books on Robert Coover (2005) and Cormac McCarthy (2012), as well as a book on The Emergence of Literary Criticism in 18th-Century Britain (2014), and a book in the series on „Future Narratives“ on video games and narrative (Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (2013)). He is the (co)editor of collections on Romanticism (British and European Romanticisms (2007), (Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern (2017)) and the Enlightenment (Enlightenment Europe and British Sociability (2021) as well as American, Canadian and African 21st-century fiction.