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"The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debates, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, and yet it made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author. In sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice."--BOOK JACKET.
This pathbreaking collection of original essays surveys an important but neglected topic: anonymous publication in England for the Elizabethan age to the present. An impressive group of scholars analyzes a wide range of literary phenomena including: Shakespeare in 17th century commonplace books; the phrase 'By a Lady'; the implied author of an eighteenth century queer fiction; Bentley and the battle of books; essays by Equiano (?); the novel, 1750 - 1830; Frankenstein's unnamed monster; the co-authored pseudonym Michael Field; nineteenth century ghostwriting; and a postmodern hoax on national identity. The editor's introduction places the essays within the context of the historical trajectory of anonymous authorship. Essential reading for anyone interested in authorship and the history of the book.
Virginia Woolf described fictions as 'grossly material things', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf's hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance. It recovering the ways in which women participated as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers.
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its socio-political history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern literature. Volume XXXVIII features another in the journal'...
Ideal for courses, this Companion examines the range, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain, 1500-1700.
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detai...
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and tradi...
One of the most intriguing features of The Assembly of Ladies, an anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English poem, is that it has remained in print in anthologies for over 500 years. Why would a poem about courtly love remain so popular for so long? This book analyses the literary and historical publishing evidence about The Assembly of Ladies, to show that the poem has remained in print not for its literary merit, but because its anonymity has allowed it to be appropriated by editors for their own particular social and political causes. The book draws together textual, contextual, and intertextual evidence about all twenty editions of The Assembly of Ladies. By examining closely how and why a single text is or has been included in canonical traditions over time, this study not only reveals the material presence of the text in various traditions but also brings to the foreground the categories scholars continue to use while defining or imagining those traditions.