"Good Bad Stuff": Editing, Advertising, and the Transformation of Genteel Literary Production in the 1890s

TL;DR: In 2000, Lewis H. Lapham, with Ellen Rosenbush, edited a huge memorial volume dedicated to honoring the influence of Harper's Magazine on U.S. literary and cultural history.

Abstract: In 2000, Lewis H. Lapham, with Ellen Rosenbush, edited a huge memorial volume dedicated to honoring the influence of Harper’s Magazine on U.S. literary and cultural history. Titled An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper’s Magazine, and accompanied by a short forward in which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. makes the dramatic, accurate claim that the magazine had “helped to shape the American literary landscape for two thirds of the life of the republic,” this printed celebration anthologizes for posterity the Harper’s tradition of incisive and creative intellectual fare.1 Lapham announces in his introduction, “Hazards of New Fortune,” the magazine’s status as a national institution, concluding with the bold declaration that the magazine would continue to do “as the four brothers Harper long ago intended, [to increase] the common stores of energy and hope.”2 The whole fantastic project, with its striking material features and idealistic account of U.S. literary production, highlights the pivotal role of specific institutions in American literary and cultural history since the late nineteenth century.3 This role has been substantially historicized by American literary scholarship; what I want to consider in this paper is the manifest durability of the specific genteel form of literary history enshrined in 2000 by Lapham and the Franklin Square Press. Works like Eric Lott’s Love and Theft, Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books, Shelley Streeby’s American Sensations, and June Howard’s Publishing the Family address the enduring influence of nineteenthand early twentieth-century ideologies of race, literary taste, war, and family on U.S. literature and culture, but the specific form of genteel literary history that remains alive and well at Harper’s requires a new approach.4 This is for two reasons: first, because the long life of this genteel self-historicizing has successfully