Lang’s slippage between abstract, intangible ideas and “the material of literature” enabled him to circumvent a discussion about access to publishing networks--access that was often gendered, classist, and racialized.
This paper suggests that Lang's article, and the debate in which it took part, exposes a concrete historical backstory for recent developments in thing theory, and suggests that the latter recapitulates in a philosophical register debates about the economics of literary publishing taking place in the late nineteenth century.
My work for this article was separate from the central thread of my dissertation research, which focused on ballads and translation. Although unrelated to poetry, this research drew on my interests in the political implications of forms of literary production and reproduction in the late nineteenth century.