The decades between 1830 and 1850 in the Northeastern United States gave rise to what historians have called the antebellum print explosion. As sexuality finds its way into print in this period, it is represented and debated simultaneously by and for different people, with different meanings, and under different auspices. Its genres span a number of antebellum audiences, including moral reform directories, “flash press” weeklies, “fancy books,” city mysteries, sentimental novels, slave narratives, medical literature, phrenological writing, and poetry. The work of the present essay is to survey some of these different examples of sexuality in print and show how they nuance our historical understanding of sexuality and its relationship to print in the antebellum period.

This chapter proposes that if scholars accepted the idea that authorship was but one form of creative contribution among many to the production of literary texts, our recognition of the breadth, impact, and influence of African Americans in all kinds of presumptive white literary production would allow us to expand the category “African American literature” considerably. Book history offers empirical and conceptual measures for conceiving “African American literature” as (1) texts read or consumed by African Americans, (2) texts that are about African Americans or that represent the experiences of African Americans, (3) texts to which African Americans deployed trades or skills (such as engraving, typesetting, bookkeeping, shipping) that may not bear the dignity of creative genius, or (4) texts that are edited by African Americans – in addition to and overlapping with (5) the more familiar conception of “African American literature” as texts authored by African Americans. Drawing examples from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and The Prodigal Daughter with illustrations by the enslaved Peter Fleet, this essay does not dispute the historical significance of African American literary and textual production so much as to think historically and theoretically about why authorship has been such a prominent part of that significance.