AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-29DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1112
Sören C. Hammerschmidt
{"title":"Introduction: Between Geniuses and Brain-Suckers. Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-Century Authorship","authors":"Sören C. Hammerschmidt","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1112","url":null,"abstract":"Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-Century Authorship.” Authorship 4.1 (2015). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/aj.v4i1.1112 Copyright Sören Hammerschmidt. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction: Between Geniuses and Brain-Suckers. Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-Century Authorship","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-23DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1111
Ingo Berensmeyer, Gero Guttzeit, A. Jameson
{"title":"“The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship”: A Critical Edition","authors":"Ingo Berensmeyer, Gero Guttzeit, A. Jameson","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1111","url":null,"abstract":"Note on the text : “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” was first published in The British Mercury in 1787, in two parts: the first part in “No. I. – May 12 1787”, pp. 14–27, and the continuation in “No. II. – May 26 1787”, pp. 43–48. The British Mercury was reissued in 1788, advertised as A New Edition. This edition survives in three copies. Our copy-text for the present edition is the Bodleian Library copy (shelfmark G Pamph 1192), which is identified with the siglum B in the notes below. This has been collated with Bodleian Library shelfmark Douce M 591 (siglum: D) and British Library shelfmark P.P.3557.mc (siglum: BL). Our choice of B as copy-text is motivated by the fact that occasional changes in spelling and wording indicate that this represents a corrected state, improving some verbal infelicities and also making the text more credible, stylistically, as a farmer’s letter, e.g. by replacing the formal “unpensioned” with the more concrete agricultural “unsown” (15), and also by giving the poor writer ‘frowzy hair’ instead of a ‘prominent beard’ (26). In editing, we have aimed for a moderately modernized text, changing long ‘s’ to round ‘s’, marking quotations with inverted commas at the beginning and end, deleting quotation marks in indirect speech, and adapting punctuation to modern usage in places where this seemed necessary or desirable. Some spellings, such as “stopt” for “stopped” or “grin’d” for “grinned” have also been modernized in order to enhance readability. Footnotes belong to the original text. All emendations and textual variants are recorded in the endnotes. Page breaks in the original text are indicated in square brackets. The explanatory endnotes refer to the original page numbers.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1104
Heather Ladd
{"title":"“As Fully Incomprehensible as the Northern Lights”: Literary Identities in The Adventures of an Author","authors":"Heather Ladd","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1104","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers an anonymously-written and understudied novel, The Adventures of an Author (1767), as self-consciously reflecting the complexities and multiplicities of professional authorship in the mid-eighteenth century. Containing a vividly-realized fictive print society, this two-volume work revolves around the exploits of a writer-protagonist named Jack Atall who confusedly constructs his own literary autobiography. Investigating The Adventures of an Author as a comic negotiation of developing conceptions of authorship and the book trade, the novel is read as ironically underlining how discussions like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and Ralph’s Case of Authors fall short in defining and defending the professional author. It can be argued that Adventures represents the period’s conceptions of authorship as unstable, depicting the chaotic inclusivity of the Republic of Letters and the inability of authorial polemics to contain and control the operations of the literary marketplace.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1103
Ingo Berensmeyer, Gero Guttzeit, A. Jameson
{"title":"'The brain-sucker: or, the distress of authorship': a late eighteenth-century satire of Grub Street","authors":"Ingo Berensmeyer, Gero Guttzeit, A. Jameson","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1103","url":null,"abstract":"Originally printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, “The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship” is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship. Probably written by the Scottish radical John Oswald (c. 1760-1793), “The Brain-Sucker” is told in the form of a letter by a farmer who tells an absent friend about his unfortunate son Dick, whose brain has become infected by poetry. This “disorder” leads Dick to London, where he falls prey to a ruthless publisher, known as “the Brain-sucker”, who keeps him like a slave in a Grub Street garret. The farmer then travels to London to save his son from the clutches of the Brain-Sucker. We present the text, for the first time, in a critical edition, collated from the three surviving copies, with textual and explanatory notes. In the accompanying essay, we discuss the text’s context of origin in late eighteenth-century Grub Street and the cultural implications of its satirical presentation of authorship.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1106
Mark Vareschi
{"title":"Reading (and Not Reading) Anonymity: Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press and A Vindication of the Press","authors":"Mark Vareschi","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1106","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I take up the anonymous An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) and A Vindication of the Press (1718), both regularly attributed to Daniel Defoe. While the pamphlets themselves consider anonymity essential to a work being read and interpreted, paradoxically, twentieth- and twenty-first century critics insist on correct attribution as the starting point for interpretation. The consequences and benefits of authorial attribution to these, and other, minor works are not insignificant. The attribution of authorship to a known author ensures that a work will survive; it may even ensure that a work is subject to study and analysis. However, authorial attribution may also foreclose study and analysis because the attributed work, if it is to be by the named author, must be made to cohere within a larger body of work.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1108
Jodi L. Wyett
{"title":"Quixotic Legacy: The Female Quixote and the Professional Woman Writer","authors":"Jodi L. Wyett","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1108","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) served as a fulcrum in eighteenth-century literary history by providing a figuration of the female quixote for subsequent women novelists who were keen to court absorbed readers on the one hand while countering stereotypes about women's critical failings on the other. The figure of the female quixote proves to be a significant mark of literary professionalism by reifying the spectre of the professional writer’s need for absorbed readers and dramatizing the occasion by which the woman writer demonstrates her own authority, paradoxically allowing both woman novel reader and woman novel writer to lay claim to intellectual authority. Ultimately, the main character Arabella's fictional model potentially echoes more actual eighteenth-century women’s experiences than her adventures at first suggest: the female quixote emerges as less a social outcast or a freak than a figure for women’s commonality, especially their intellectual and ethical ambitions in a world inimical to their interests.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1105
M. Richardson
{"title":"Authors and Their ‘Mischievous’ Books: The Salutary Experience of Southey v Sherwood","authors":"M. Richardson","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1105","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1817 case of Southey v Sherwood Lord Eldon LC denied an injunction against the pirating of Robert Southey’s potentially ‘mischievous’ Wat Tyler, setting the tone for judgments in cases to come. The judges’ approach gave little account to the concerns of the authors whose interests in controlling their pirates lay in preserving their reputations and maintaining their livelihoods. The upshot was that the pirates prospered, large numbers of possibly seditious, blasphemous, defamatory and obscene books were published in England, and authors and judges were publicly excoriated. Eventually, judges had to reconsider their failed approach while authors looked for new ways to control their status and sources of income – as well as formulating some sharper distinctions between their public and private lives.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1109
M. Henty
{"title":"Review: Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014)","authors":"M. Henty","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1109","url":null,"abstract":"A review of Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman . New York: Knopf, 2014. 408 pp. $29.95.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2015-06-17DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1107
Susan Whyman
{"title":"\"The pleasure of writing is inconceivable\": William Hutton (1723-1815) as an Author","authors":"Susan Whyman","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V4I1.1107","url":null,"abstract":"William Hutton started life as a child labourer, but rose to become a bookseller, stationer, and wealthy paper merchant. Like many autodidacts, he longed to be an author and published 15 popular books. This article examines Hutton’s remarks on ‘writing’, which reveal his motives, methods, and goals of authorship. It also gauges his impact on the literary marketplace by analysing 65 periodical reviews of his works. Hutton’s books were based on personal experience, and mixed memoir and biography with historical, topographical, and travel writing. They suited the nation’s thirst for entertaining formats and established him as a new kind of writer, who produced lively, unlearned books for a commercial age. Hutton’s breach of polite norms and opinionated style horrified the literary establishment. But they also attracted readers lower down the social scale, who enjoyed irreverent views on political, religious, economic, and social issues. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers and put Birmingham and northern regions on the national literary map. Together this author and his critics offer a portrait of the evolution of authorship, the spread of knowledge and taste, and the creation of cultural identity in a time of literary change.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AuthorshipPub Date : 2014-11-28DOI: 10.21825/AJ.V3I2.1086
A. Selleri
{"title":"Oscar Wilde and Authorialism","authors":"A. Selleri","doi":"10.21825/AJ.V3I2.1086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21825/AJ.V3I2.1086","url":null,"abstract":"This essay introduces the concept of “authorialism” to characterise the critical orientation that sees literary works primarily as actions on the part of their authors rather than as linguistic objects, using the early reception of Oscar Wilde’s works as a case study. It is argued that authorialism was the dominant tendency in 1875-1900 Anglophone criticism, and that it has characterised assessments of Wilde’s works to this day. The method has the advantage of finding coherence in literary works, which is useful in assessing matters of value; the textual features of Wilde’s writings, however, resist authorialist readings by not featuring the expected coherence.","PeriodicalId":30455,"journal":{"name":"Authorship","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68394161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}