By tracing the publication history of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, this article shows how the gate-keeping mechanism of censorship can facilitate literary prestige. The release of the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch in 1966 after two obscenity trials marked the end of complete literary censorship in the US and was a crucial step towards the canonization of underground authors. By making it necessary to argue on behalf of the text’s form, the obscenity trials helped in framing Burroughs’s arguably “formless” text as both a coherent work and a work of high literary merit. The article offers a detailed account of the enabling role of censorship in the case of Naked Lunch, which consisted not only in generating the interest of underground publishers (Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in the US) but also in helping Burroughs’s formless, fragmented text take shape and as a novel.
Since the emergence of Afro-pessimism in the early 2000s, the focus of much critical conversation in and around the discourse has been on the viability of its ontological claims as to the non-‘Human’ status of blackness. Departing from these essential debates, this article turns rather to the generic qualities of Afro-pessimism, to suggest that the discourse’s formal choices reveal discrepancies in the ontological theses being argued. In comparing two of the discourse’s key texts, Frank Wilderson’s memoir, Afropessimism (2021) and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons (2013), I illustrate how Wilderson’s memoir performs the thesis of ontological anti-blackness through the failures of its first-person singular narration; failures expressive of the impossibility of the black ‘object’ claiming access to the memoir’s generic institutions of authorship and authority. By contrast, reading Harney and Moten’s critique of the university through the genre of the manifesto shows their depersonalized first-person plural to adopt an appositional and ‘fugitive’ relation to the totalizing political authority entailed in the genre. Whereas the failures of Wilderson’s text enact, then, a kind of refusal to participate in the institutions of authority enshrined in memoir’s first-person singular, Harney and Moten’s utopian ‘we’ ‘refuse[s] to refuse’. Their ‘undercommons’ critique addresses, at once, the Enlightenment-born institution of the university, and related institutions of genre, representation, and, ultimately, subjectification. Through their appositional orientation to the manifesto, Moten and Harney propose an Afro-pessimist thesis formally and substantively different to Wilderson’s—one arguably less predicated on failure.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, collecting authors’ material remains developed from a private pursuit into a public mission, a history that is coupled to the emergence of modern institutions such as the research library and the literary archive. Authors of the period were themselves both aware of and involved in the market for literary manuscripts and the increasingly institutionalized culture of collecting writers’ papers. This article looks at literary fiction as a contemporary medium in which this moment of transition was mirrored. As a case study, I focus on the early writings of Edith Wharton – retracing a gradual shift in her creative interests from the autographs of contemporary or near-contemporary writers to those of canonized figures and from collecting as an amateur occupation to collecting as a professional endeavour.
As institutions of authorship, publishers rely on their own networks of gatekeepers and contacts to source texts from around the world for their lists. These far-flung gatekeepers can be influential and instrumental in the circulation of literature, but have remained largely invisible in the field and within literary and book historical scholarship. Using archival materials from Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and Mainzer Verlagsarchiv, this contribution explores the extraordinary role of Sanford J. Greenburger as a literary scout for the German publisher Rowohlt in the 1960s. Greenburger is of particular relevance as a case study for transatlantic gatekeeping, having scouted authors and texts for Rowohlt’s prize-winning portfolio of translations from the U.S. Besides making Greenburger’s labor for Rowohlt visible and thus restructuring our understanding of Rowohlt’s U.S. interests, the contribution also offers insights into the value of publishing archives and archival research.
This essay explores the best-selling American author Edith Wharton’s status as a bibliophile and book collector. It draws comparisons between her tastes as a collector and those of some of her neighbors, especially those residing in the Berkshires area of western Massachusetts around 1900. It focuses, in particular, on a rare, first-edition copy of the play Esther (1689), by Jean Racine; Wharton owned a copy of this book and so did her neighbors, the Choate family. As such, the essay launches an investigation into the value that Racine held as an author for members of Wharton’s milieu in fin-de-siècle America, exposing a set of class-specific beliefs that appear to counter the progressivist and democratic ideologies of that era. It reads Wharton’s and her associates’ interests in Racine as indicative of class-specific ideas regarding cultural inheritance. It argues that Wharton and the Choates, in collecting rare editions of Racine, were doing more than paying homage to literary tradition or enhancing their cultural capital; they were mounting tacit claims for their particular positions within a given social order, inspired in part by romantic visions of pre-revolutionary France.
This paper reflects on concepts of early modern authorship during the early modern period based on miscellanies and the roles of their compilors. The statement "I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctor doth" from Palsgrave’s Dictionary of French and English serves as a starting point: here, the compiler becomes a co-creative agent in that he plays with identities in composing the collection of poetry as much as with concepts and notions of individuality and community. This will be illustrated on the basis of a single poem, "Harpalus‘ Complaint" from Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) up unto the second edition of Englands Helicon (1614). A variety of interaction between several roles can be observed: compilors become co-authors themselves but also do readers when poems are newly arranged and integrated into a narrative. While Tottel’s Miscellany plays with identities and attributions, in Englands Helicon the (re)contextualisation of poems within newly created narratives is central. The paper thus shows that concepts of authorship around 1600 go beyond our contemporary notions that are often based on ideas of the creative genius: compilation becomes authorial business, and is creative.
Book review: Ross K. Tangedal's The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (2021).
This article reads Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper in the context of modernist literary authorship and against the historical background of scenarios of female authorship in British fiction. It focuses on strategies of women’s writing as embodied in Smith’s protagonist, Pompey Casmilus. In a period in which the category of “woman writer” was firmly associated with middlebrow sentimentality, Smith explores formal and material constraints on women as authors of fiction. In its diagnosis of the publishing world, the segregation of readerly tastes, and the constraints of established generic forms, Novel on Yellow Paper confronts the modern(ist) predicament of female authorship in novel ways.
Des années 1940 au milieu des années 1960, le Québec a assisté à l’essor des collections de romans populaires publiés en fascicules, écrits par des auteurs locaux et se déroulant dans La Belle Province. Signés d’une multitude de pseudonymes, ces objets sont extrêmement révélateurs du fonctionnement de l’auctorialité, sous le mode de la lecture sérielle. En s’intéressant à la collection « Roman d’amour » des Éditions Police-Journal, cet article souhaite explorer plus spécifiquement le fonctionnement du nom d’auteur en lien avec le pacte de lecture établi par le roman sentimental. --- From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, Quebec witnessed a boom in series of popular novels published in instalments, written by local authors, and set in La Belle Province. Appearing under a multitude of pseudonyms, these books tell us a great deal about the workings of authorship in the reading of serialised publications. In its examination of the series “Roman d’amour” put out by Éditions Police-Journal, this article seeks to explore in a more specific way how the author’s name functions in relation to the reading contract established by the genre of the romance novel.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Alice Munro drew attention in interviews to her rapt admiration for the work of William Maxwell, a writer she has called “my favorite writer in the world.” The two were not close, although they met a few times through their shared association with the New Yorker. In 1988 Munro published an appreciation of Maxwell’s work and, after his death in 2000, agreed to revise it for a tribute volume published in 2004. During those years too, Munro was at work on a family volume she had long contemplated, The View from Castle Rock (2006), one that was inspired in part by and modelled on Maxwell’s Ancestors: A Family History (1971). This article examines the Maxwell-Munro crux as an example of the dynamics of authorship; it is an important example of two compatible writers who, throughout their careers, created narrative rooted in the very stuff of their own experience in place and time—whether seen as fiction, autobiography, or memoir. Each did so in ways that accentuate, for the critic intent on analysing authorship, the play of the past in shaping of any narrative.
In her essays, Marlene NourbeSe Philip has been forthcoming about being “an unembedded, disappeared poet and writer in Canada” whose contributions to cultural life have been systematically obstructed, partly because of her public activism on behalf of Black communities. Her visibility is an oxymoronic, bedeviling combination of disappearance and unchosen hypervisibility, with the hypervisibility largely brought about by a radical misunderstanding and abjection of her work as a cultural activist. In this article, I examine how the “embedded, disappeared” and yet present, visible, audible literary and activist career of Marlene NourbeSe Philip challenges prevailing conceptions of authorship in Canada. In particular, I think about how and why Philip’s hypervisible invisibility offers a challenge to the regimes of visibility which tend to define literary celebrity. Any account of celebrity visibility needs to recognise the fact that the implications and consequences of visibility do not sit evenly on all public persons, as the theories of Katherine McKittrick, Jenny Burman, Sarah J. Jackson, and Toni Morrison testify. Neither is celebrity visibility the dualistic, either/or proposition so frequently framed by celebrity studies: either a much-desired good (an adoring audience) or a reviled evil, as in instances of notoriety, or in cases of overly intrusive, unwanted public attention. Instead, we need to reckon seriously with the ways visibility may be both systemically denied and reimposed as oppressive hypervisibility, as I argue it is in the celebrity of Marlene NourbeSe Philip and, by extension, in that of many racialised public figures.
Illustrations—both drawings and photographs—appeared in most books by E. Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), Canada’s first prominent Indigenous author, from their first publication in the early twentieth century through various reprints and editions into the twenty-first. This article examines the evolution of these images as we address the choices made by her publishers with regard to moments and modes of illustration, with special attention to her two most popular volumes, Legends of Vancouver (1911) and Flint and Feather (1912). Focusing on the interior illustrations that were read along with the texts, we consider how these drawings and photographs contributed to the construction of Johnson as an Indigenous author and to the interpretation of her stories and poems by those who prepared her books, given that her publications were directed to a mainly non-Indigenous readership.
This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.
William Edward Daniel Ross transformed himself into a popular fiction novelist in mid-life; the years between 1962 and 1967 witnessing his authorial advance from apprentice to journeyman. During this period, he produced at least 85 original novels, which appeared in the United States or the United Kingdom in hardback, paperback, or digest format. By 1966, Ross’s rapid production identified him as a “literary factory” within the trade. As a “professional writer,” he responded to the market needs of publishers, which led him to produce novels in multiple genres, including mysteries, westerns, nurse romances, and gothics. The majority of his novels appeared under pseudonyms, most of them feminine; as Ross recognised, this circumstance obscured his claims to authorship, leading to his early designation as “Canada’s best-known unknown author.” A substantial collection of Ross’s professional papers held at Boston University represents an invaluable resource into this author’s early years as a novelist, and into the trans-Atlantic popular fiction market for which he wrote. In combination with newspaper and magazine articles episodically published about him, this resource reveals an author who, between 1962 and 1967, established himself with publishers as a reliable creator of popular fiction. Ross brokered key business relationships with several hardback publishers producing popular fiction for the commercial lending libraries, as well as half a dozen paperback firms. Ross’s remarkable level of production relied on key “support personnel”: his wife Marilyn Ross facilitated his writing daily while New York-based literary agents Robert Mills and Donald MacCampbell offered strategic guidance.
This article examines the publishing conditions and reception history of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s satirical novel Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908). It contends that Duncan’s understanding of her reading audiences, and the gendered expectations of a woman writing in the early twentieth century, allowed her to advance the novel genre in an English imperial literary market. Cousin Cinderella foregrounds the circulation of people and printed material and is interested in their reading and interpretation through the networked connections that empire engenders. Indeed, Duncan’s global mobility and her perspective on Canada as a rejuvenating racial and economic presence in an enlarged world led her to the type of generic experimentation discerned in Cousin Cinderella and to a lesser extent The Imperialist of 1904. In Cousin Cinderella, Duncan extends both novelistic romance and realism through the trope of female authorship and the novel’s allegorised character Mary Trent. Through Mary, Duncan features women in race-making and nation-making projects, where sentimental marriage functions allegorically for practical political and economic ends. And like Mary, Duncan considered herself attached to Canada, as she established success in a market dominated by male authors and metropolitan markets. This article on an understudied novel in Duncan’s oeuvre brings together a study of authorship, literary analysis, and cultural history to contextualise and elucidate Duncan’s path-breaking career.
The Third Franklin Expedition of the British Royal Navy set sail in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage. There were no survivors of the expedition, and nearly all records associated with it were lost. This personal and textual disappearance severed the narrative control of those who participated in the expedition and sought to write about their experiences. This article examines the authorship and the authorial afterlife of Captain James Fitzjames, an officer of the Third Franklin Expedition, with an emphasis on the ways in which Fitzjames’ legacy has been contextualized and recontextualized across time, discourse, and format.
The period after E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)’s literary career ended and before the emergence of contemporary Indigenous writing in Canada, roughly between 1910 and 1960, has been labelled as a “barren period” for Indigenous authorship. The relative failure by Indigenous Peoples in this period to garner publishers or attract wide readerships, however, had more to do with the political and social environment of Canada at the time, than either an ability (or inability) to write material of value. Bernice Winslow Loft (Dawendine) (1902-1997) and Ethel Brant Monture (1892-1977), in the face of considerable challenges to have their voices heard, demonstrate that the period after Johnson’s death was not entirely void of Indigenous authorship. Loft and Monture are among a small body of Indigenous authors during this period who, through persistence and performance, left their marks on the stages and pages of settler Canadian libraries and bookshelves.
This article reads Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper in the context of modernist literary authorship and against the historical background of scenarios of female authorship in British fiction. It focuses on strategies of women’s writing as embodied in Smith’s protagonist, Pompey Casmilus. In a period in which the category of “woman writer” was firmly associated with middlebrow sentimentality, Smith explores formal and material constraints on women as authors of fiction. In its diagnosis of the publishing world, the segregation of readerly tastes, and the constraints of established generic forms, Novel on Yellow Paper confronts the modern(ist) predicament of female authorship in novel ways.
A review of Mingchao Mao, Friedrich Hebbels Arbeit an Schiller. Die Schiller-Rezeption in Hebbels Ästhetik und Dramatik. De Gruyter, 2019.
