Illuminating the Antebellum Literary Marketplace: The Artfulness of Literary Labor in George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light

Abstract

Abstract George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850) has been understood as a characteristic text of urban sensationalism, a body of writing more often studied for its response to modernity than literary artfulness. Yet, while Foster seems eager to spectacularize the hidden corners of urban life, he also creates metaliterary moments around scenes of literary business and labor, especially the nighttime labor that the technology of gaslight enabled. Reading these self-referential moments in the context of dramatic changes in publishing facilitated by gaslight opens a theoretical intersection between materialist and aesthetic criticism concerning the relationship between work and art. I argue that Foster presents New York by Gas-Light as at once a product of his industrialized labor and an artifact of self-conscious literary crafting by cultivating attention to the material conditions of his aesthetic creation. As I show, Foster’s reflexive materialist aesthetics disrupts longstanding premises of literary history: it counters largely linguistic accounts of literary style by connecting literary artistry to the work of commercial publication, resists an autonomous ideal that abstracts literature from the material labor of authors, and reclaims the artistic possibilities of what might otherwise be regarded as mass cultural forms.