Literature and the MarketplaceLiterature and the Marketplace addresses one of the great ironies of nineteenth century British and American literature: the fact that authors of that era, in voicing their alienation from middle class readers, paradoxically gave expression to feelings of alienation felt by those same readers. As William G. Rowland Jr. points out, romantic writers thought of the market as conspiring against imagination (Blake) or telling the truth (Melville) and