Overview

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.  

Full Product Details

Author:   Manushag N. Powell
Publisher:   Bucknell University Press
Imprint:   Bucknell University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.40cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.60cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781611485950

ISBN 10:   1611485959
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   18 July 2014
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter 1: Author and Eidolon I.The periodical life cycle II.The Eidolon III.Anonymity? IV.Genre and the public sphere V.The performance of authorship; readers as spectators Chapter 2: Early Periodical Cross-Dressing I.Lucubrations and sexual identity II.Release the Crackenthorpes: The embattled Female Tatler III.War on two fronts: The Female Tatler and the British Apollo Chapter 3: Performance, Masculinity, and Paper Wars I.The Fielding-Hill Paper War II.Acting manly in the Covent-Garden Journal III.John Hill’s failure to fight IV.“Female” warriors enter the fray V.Eidolons on Stage Chapter 4: Femininity and the Periodical I.Confirmed bachelors and spinsters: Eidolons and the problem of marriage II.“Below the Dignity of the human Species:” Establishing authority in Montagu and Haywood III.The Old Maid: Frances Brooke’s “Freeborn Briton” versus the coffee-house Connoisseur IV.Beyond the spinster: Parrots and other Triflers Chapter 5: No Animal in Nature so Mortal as an Author, or, Death and the Eidolon I.The genre from Hell? Printers’ Devils and News from the Dead II.Periodicals as monuments, and the hope of resurrection III.Corpses, plagiarizers of the dead, and other textual revenants: Grub-Street and Defoe Bibliography

Reviews

Manushag N. Powell's elegant work pushes further...arguments about the complexity of authorial personae in essay periodicals. ... Anyone interested in the wide range of periodicals that claimed to 'police the audience into behaving as an ideal English society,'... will find important angles by which to come at these texts. Casting a wider net, Powell also enlightens her reader about lesser-known periodicals. ... Powell's excellent argument that 'the periodical represents authorship intensified' is well grounded. ... Powell draws a fascinating link between the eidolon and a paperbased economy... Powell's scholarship is meticulous and robust, and her writing is engaging. She deals with such essential aspects of the genre as anonymity, public-private transgression (the periodical moves beyond the coffee house as a space for reading and discussion), and instances when eidolons grew out of well-known eighteenth-century theatre. ... Even as she explicates the mixture of energy and enervation that informed the eidolon of eighteenth-century essay periodicals, Powell revitalizes our thinking about the genre. Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Author Information

Manushag N. Powell is assistant professor in the English Department at Purdue University. Her research interests are centered on the cultural history of literary forms and include early types of “genre” fiction writing, the periodical essay, and authors-as-characters.

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