When critics of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon, sitting alongside other works that, like the popular copybooks in antebellum America, are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Different kinds of copying in this period were distinctly feminized practices, such as artistic copying, pedagogical recitation, and literary imitation. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying, as the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader; this practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production.

Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key concepts for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period—Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow—to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. The explicitly feminized forms of the copy between and within media, she argues, became a productive means by which writers across a variety of genres interrogated the ill-defined but ubiquitous idea of an “original” American literature. Original Copy bridges three bodies of scholarship that have remained largely distinct—studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory—to argue for the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature. 

“This is an important work of scholarship, full of illuminating insights and brilliant readings. The story Original Copy tells has implications not only for our understanding of the aesthetics of the nineteenth century, but its reconfiguration of imitation and original sheds important new light on modernism and twentieth-century literature, as well.”—Brian Glavely, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis

“Original Copy makes a significant contribution to the field of American literary studies in that it revises our understanding of the importance of vivid description, as opposed to original invention, to imagining and understanding America. Vogelius has a lively and readable way of handling all of this complicated material.”—Mary Louise Kete, author of Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in 19th Century America