Search results for "George Palmer Putnam"

Present Uncertainty and Looking to the Past: The Ambiguous Literary Nationalism of Putnam’s Monthly

2023

Putnam’s Monthly (1853-1857) was one of the best literary and general interest magazines in antebellum America. Besides its high quality, what made the New York-based magazine stand out was its commitment to publishing American writers and focusing on American themes at a time when, with no reliable international copyright protection in place, many periodicals in the United States were in the habit of reprinting the works of foreign (primarily British) authors, sometimes without payment. However, despite its optimistic literary nationalism, Putnam’s Monthly expressed uncertainty about the quality of contemporary American literature and, indeed, about the capacity of American society to enco…