Performing Authorship In Eighteenth Century English Periodicals

Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century. Unique to the British eighteenth century, the periodical is of great value to scholars of English cultural studies because it offers a venue where authors hash out, often in extremely dramatic terms, what they think it should take to be a writer, what their relationship with their new mass-media audience ought to be, and what qualifications should act as gatekeepers to the profession. Exploring these questions in The Female Spectator, The Drury-Lane Journal,The Midwife, The World, The Covent-Garden Journal, and other periodicals of the early and mid-eighteenth century, Manushag Powell examines several “paper wars” waged between authors. At the height of their popularity, essay periodicals allowed professional writers to fashion and make saleable a new kind of narrative and performative literary personality, the eidolon, and arguably birthed a new cult of authorial personality. In Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals, Powell argues that the coupling of persona and genre imposes a lifespan on the periodical text; the periodicals don’t only rise and fall, but are born, and in good time, they die.

This book discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century.

The eighteenth-century essay periodical is a remarkably self-reflexive genre. These texts helped define English middle-class politics, manners, marriage, fashion, and popular culture, but they are also deeply, loudly interested in what it means to be an English author. Through the device of the eidolon---that is, the fictitious but often well-developed author-editor personality that organizes the works---periodical authors are able to meditate more openly and often than poets or novelists on the intercourse between professional authors and their audiences. This study's introduction considers the fascinating and often painful manipulations undertaken by periodicals as they attempt to marry the pleasure of reading to the desire of the literary marketplace to observe the author. Much of the essay periodical's appeal hinges on a rhetorical version of dramatic flair, to which the performative categories of gender and class are key. What gradually becomes clear is that while eidolons as a group comprise a recognizable class of fictional character, individually they tend toward the cross-dressed, colorful, and contradictory. Chapter 2 explores the many trials and tribulations undertaken by the bellicose first author of the Female Tatler in her two nearly simultaneous paper wars, wherein the disputed quality of authorial gentility becomes more important even than gender. Chapter 3 re-examines the 1752 Fielding-Hill paper war as a complicated series of masculine posturings among the many authors it involved. Each author must carefully weigh his public need to perform masculinity against his moral responsibilities. Chapter 4 poses the question of sex and authorship from a different angle, and reads several important female-authored periodicals in an attempt to discover why it is that despite the importance of the bourgeois family unit to periodicals, eidolons almost never marry. Chapter 5 ponders the vexed attempts of periodicals to find a respectable space for feminine voices in print culture, and suggests that despite the clear value periodicals place upon masculinity in matters of authorship, the genre was thoroughly dependant upon the attractions of feminine discourse. The epilogue considers the (debatable) "death" of the genre by underscoring the importance of a rhetoric of violence and morbidity throughout its history.

Urban Enlightenment offers the first literary history of the British periodical essay spanning the entire eighteenth century, and the first to study the genre's development and cultural impact in a transatlantic context.

Argues that eighteenth-century literature defined itself as 'English' and 'modern' by engaging with debates about Chinese history and culture.

Featuring cutting-edge essays by leading scholars, this collection formulates a new feminist theory of eighteenth-century women's satire.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth.

Encompassing a broad definition of the topic, this Companion provides a survey of the literary magazine from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. It offers a comprehensive theorization of the literary magazine in the wake of developments in periodical studies in the last decade, bringing together a wide variety of approaches and concerns. With its distinctive chronological and geographical scope, this volume sheds new light on the possibilities and difficulties of the concept of the literary magazine, balancing a comprehensive overview of key themes and examples with greater attention to new approaches to magazine research. Divided into three main sections, this book offers: • Theory—it investigates definitions and limits of what a literary magazine is and what it does. • History and regionalism—a very broad historical and geographic sweep draws new connections and offers expanded definitions. • Case studies—these range from key modernist little magazines and the popular middlebrow to pulp fiction, comics, and digital ventures, widening the ambit of the literary magazine. The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine offers new and unforeseen cross-connections across the long history of literary periodicals, highlighting the ways in which it allows us to trace such ideas as the “literary” as well as notions of what magazines do in a culture.

A Companion to British Literature, The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660 - 1830