In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than provincial authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. To transcend the national rivalries of the literary field, authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, Joseph Rezek argues, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society. Through an examination of the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.