Toward a Fungible Scrip: Orestes Brownson’s <i>Boston Quarterly Review</i> and the Valuation of American Literature

This paper considers how Orestes Brownson used the Boston Quarterly Review, the periodical he established, edited, published, and, for the most part, independently composed, to undertake an immanent critique of American political economy between 1838 and 1842. In opposition to virtually all of his contemporaries, Brownson believed that American literature should be perceived as operating within a single value structure that joined aesthetic and market modes of valuation. In the wake of the nonrenewal of the US Bank’s charter in 1832 and the Panic of 1837, the American paper money system became unstable and Brownson proposed that the shared formal identity between literature and economics meant that literature was the forum best fitted to advocate and enact economic reform. The paper considers the genesis and development of Brownson’s ideas and methods through three stages: first, the establishment of equivalence between conditions of aesthetic and economic value; second, the means by which literary form might intervene in and direct the progress of eco- nomic literacy; finally, the backgrounds to Brownson’s recourse to the value structure of Catholicism after 1844. Focusing on Brownson’s extraordinary and unique prolixity, I argue that his formal innovations were explicitly intended to disrupt the lexicography of contemporary paper money and assert a new institutional form of value based on labor time, something represented in the text by his emphasis on the collaborative literary labors of author and reader.