This book deals with moments of literary authority in nineteenth-century US culture. Its broadest thesis is that modern literary space is shaped by the logic of cultural professionalism, which first emerged with the eighteenth-century transformation of the public sphere, and the extension and intensification of the print markets that produced internally validated centers of aesthetic production, or ‘literary fields’ (Bourdieu). Literary fields transcend political and national boundaries and cut across familiar period distinctions. Rather than seeing literary history as a temporal succession of essentially different historical identities (leading from, say, naïve Realists to self-reflexive Modernists, or ‘grandmotherly’ Boston Brahmins to radical Whitmanians), we can imagine historical periods as internally differentiated spaces with relatively separate literary territories that branch into transatlantic and transhistorical connections. There are important ways in which historically and spatially distant literary avant-gardes resemble each other more closely than their immediate literary neighbors: Whitman's poetics seems light years from Longfellow's, but it has a great deal in common with earlier avant-gardes – according to Harold Bloom, ‘one must go back to Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Shelley and Keats' to find Whitman's ‘aesthetic equivalent’ (1995: 265). And no mid-century poet blends as easily as Whitman into the high modernist literary landscape whose representative critics reinterpreted Leaves of Grass as a ‘language experiment’ central to American modernity. It is tempting to account for these family resemblances by locating Whitman in a timeless Western Canon, where the greatest artists compose ‘a simultaneous order’ (Eliot 1975: 38) or a linear chain of anxiety-driven ‘influence’.