Abstract: This dissertation, 'The 'Chaos of Publication' in Scotland and America, 1740--1801,' examines the proliferation of print and resulting popular fascination with literal nobodies (disembodied authors and fictional characters) in two cultures traditionally centered on figures of speech : bards and ministers. Arguing against Jurgen Habermas's equation of liberal democracy with freedom of the press, 'The 'Chaos of Publication'' reveals the extent to which Scottish and American writers and readers analogously experienced the rising cultural authority of so-called 'impersonal' writing as an effective means of social control. I acknowledge the cultural mediation of print by focusing on Scottish and American authors' analogous embrace of print, as a mass media, to silence radical personalities, manufacture social order, and develop coherent national identities in the wake of their rebellions against Britain: the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Revolution. At the same time, I reinterpret Roland Barthes's poststructural equation of death and authorship in order to engage in literal terms the health hazards of professional authorship (the accumulative physiological effects of writing on the bodies of Tobias Smollett and Charles Brockden Brown), and I examine the role that gender plays in determining an author's relationship to print. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)