Literary Capitalism: A Material Rereading of Poe

There is a specter haunting contemporary literary studies-the specter of a surplus of interpretation. In the May 2000 issue of PMLA, Lindsay Waters, editor at Harvard University Press, argues that, despite the steady decrease of sales and despite the fact that normally “publishers resist producing books that people are unwilling to purchase or to insist that their institutional libraries purchase,” the overproduction of books has persisted for many years now because the political economy of academic publishing knows pressures more profound than the bottom line: