Figuring Authorship in Antebellum AmericaThe increased demand for salable entertainment, for pleasing an expanded and unknown audience in its moments of leisure, fostered a new consciousness of authorship as a commercial and professional mode of work in the first half of the nineteenth century in America. This book argues that a range of canonical and more recently enfranchised antebellum authorsfrom Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fernrhetorically