Invisible countries: The poetics of the American information commodity, 1891-1919.

Abstract

Under the pressure of a growing mass publishing market and technological infrastructure, nineteenth-century America began to define information as a type of salable object distinct from the physical commodities which simply carried information (books and wires, for example). The peculiar characteristics of the information commodity shaped the efforts of cultural producers to understand cultural commerce. This dissertation aims to trace the history of those efforts and to highlight their genealogical relationship to the economic subtext of our own contemporary fantasies about interactive virtual realities. The information commodity demands a particularly arduous process of cultural construction, for it defies the economics of scarcity on which theories of political economy first founded their notions of exchange and value. To illustrate this principle, this dissertation examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American texts whose concern with the business of culture leads them to work through the idea of the disembodied information commodity: the fictions of William Dean Howells, early comic strips, and the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. All of these works engage with intellectual property disputes by using the trope of a fantastic, otherworldly realm to explore the complex transactions between textual commodities, their manifestations in the physical world, their writers, and their readers. All experiment with a series format, a ceding of limited textual property rights to the reader, a form of textual identity that thrives on reproduction and appropriation, and a metafictional disruption of fictive frames that probes the boundaries of the textual commodity. In short, in all of these texts the imagining of the information commodity requires a reconstruction of basic economic concepts and narrative forms.