Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:31st Oct '91
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship. But literary works can and frequently do have multiple authors, sometimes with divided and even conflicting intentions among them. Stillinger explores multiple authorship in the case of Keats and his helpers who assisted in the creation of Isabella; John Stuart Mill and his wife in the writing of Mill's Autobiography; the author revising earlier versions of himself, as with Wordsworth in The Prelude; and the author interacting collaboratively with sources and influences (Coleridge in Biographia Literaria).
'I strongly recommend publication... (Multiple Authorship) will be a major contribution both to textual scholarship and to theories of interpretation and editing.' Professor Susan Wolfson, Princeton University
'It is refreshing ... to see the case against "genius" or authorial autonomy made in so straightforwardly empirical a fashion, with a good editor's characteristic fidelity to awkward particulars.' Times Literary Supplement
'it is the major achievement of Stillinger's book to detail the facts of multiple authorship that we have been either too blind to see or too prisoned in our romantic myth of authorship to acknowledge ... a clear theory of multiplicity relies upon such scholarly identification of authors and versions as Stillinger himself has so brilliantly exposed.' Paul Magnuson, New York University, Wordsworth Circle, Annual Review Issue '93, Vol. 23.4
ISBN: 9780195068610
Dimensions: 147mm x 217mm x 24mm
Weight: 408g
272 pages