'A new and more perfect edition': Reading, editing, and publishing autobiography in America, 1787-1850

Readers in the early republic saw certain texts as revealing the character and personality of their authors, a hermeneutic at odds with Republican political theory's model of disinterested rational inquiry. The mostly anonymous and pseudonymous writers whose texts fill the newspapers of the 1780s found debates over the principles governing textual interpretation inseparable from debates over the principles of governance. By the 1830s this approach to texts, which I call "personal reading," had become so naturalized that for some narratives it no longer registered as a hermeneutic at all: the assertive presence of the author seemed instead to be an objective attribute of texts themselves. "Autobiography," I argue, named works bearing this surplus of personality, regardless of their relation to real individuals or verifiable events. This project uses the techniques of book history to trace this epochal but largely invisible conceptual shift. It argues that attempts to define the genre have suffered from a blindness to the materiality of autobiography. The labor of compositors, engravers, printers, binders, and editors gives concrete existence to authors who only seem to speak for themselves. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is an extreme example of the ways changing reading practices construct radically different versions of same work. Publishers transformed Franklin's Works---a miscellaneous collection of short texts by and about Franklin first published in 1793---into a univocal Autobiography. Drawing on the annotations scattered in these books, I argue, however, that some readers resisted this change. Even as the texts offered increasingly personal revelations of Franklin's character, some readers continued to find more precept than personality in the story of Franklin's life. Stephen Burroughs's Memoirs (1798) can be seen as an extended meditation on the pitfalls of personal reading. Their publication history, unlike Franklin's, moves away from the single authorial voice. Burroughs's life appears in a staggering range of forms: books and their abridgements, literally hundreds of newspaper reports, romances, drama, even poetry, all of which demonstrate the futility of trying to unite multiple characters to a singular authorial source. These texts consistently reveal the creative reuse characteristic of composite identities, of selves made up of others. The most striking feature of the texts I analyze is how much the character of the autobiographer owes to the silent partners of the so-called the literature of the self.