A Theory of Early Modern Authorship (original) (raw)
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Authorship and the Discovery of Character in Medieval Romance
This dissertation argues that by pioneering new ways of constructing and reading literary character, writers of twelfth- to fourteenth-century romance also claimed a new authority for vernacular fiction. Through readings of several key medieval texts, the dissertation not only illuminates character as an underestimated critical tool used by medieval writers in but also intervenes in the ongoing scholarly discussion of medieval authorship. It begins with Le Roman d'Enéas, a twelfth-century adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid that, by revising tensions in the characters of the Latin royal court, familiarizes the epic for a courtly audience and posits its writer as an authoritative interpreter of the Aeneid. Next, medieval concepts of memory and contemporary serial narrative theory are used to argue that Chrétien de Troyes, inventor of French Arthurian romance, creates a model of character that requires audiences to read his romances as a corpus and thus establishes himself as the au...
The Ethics of Authorship: Some Tensions in the 11th Century
The acts of taking up the pen and circulating a text under one’s own name were fraught with ethical tensions in Byzantium. Assuming authorship of texts contravened the Christian ideals of humility and self-effacement, and could incur the accusations of ambition and self-importance, all the more so if language and style were skilful and sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is exactly skilful writing that displayed the intellectual abilities of the author and could bring social advancement and material profits. This tension between social ambitions and ethical implications is particularly outspoken in the eleventh century, when a new elite of self-conscious intellectuals sought to gather social capital on the basis of their intellectual precedence. At the same time, other cultural and ideological groups made their voice heard. This paper attempts to lay bare the various sets of representations (‘discourses’) that take issue with the ethical implications of authorship in the eleventh century. This can be done through an analysis of the ambiguous terms with which ‘skilful language’ (to use a neutral term) is denominated. The well-known habit to reject erudition and learnedness in prologues is also taken into consideration. On the one hand, the different discourses can be situated along the ideological and cultural fault lines that run through our period. But these tensions are also to be found in one and the same person. I discuss here the examples of Michael Psellos and John Mauropous: these polyvalent intellectuals developed different strategies to cope with the ethical issues that ambitious authorship provoked.
The Medieval “Author”: An Idea Whose Time Hadn’t Come?
The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, 2006
The term "author" has become so much a part of our vocabulary and literary attitude that it's natural to feel that it must always have been so. As Heidegger says:"The artist is the origin of the work.The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." 1 Since the Renaissance, the author has been conceived as the professional "literary figure" who writes works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms to make an "original" creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were bound to consider the work and the author together. Opinions have varied radically as to the extent of the author's being qua individual that may find expression in his work. What has not been questioned-at least until recently-is the fact of there being an authorial presence behind the work and recoverable through it. T. S. Eliot, for example, argued that the author is someone who comes to grips not with a personal psyche, but with a poetic medium, which he calls "tradition": [T]he poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. 2 Kenneth Burke argues, on the other hand, that it may be precisely the discovery of his "personality," or at least aspects of it, that the poet V. Greene (ed.
The interplay of pseudo-authors in 13th-century Arthurian romances has attracted the attention of scholars since the very beginnings of Medieval studies. Already P. Paris had brought to light the main authorial cross-references in the texts, and subsequent scholars have continually interpreted and re-interpreted them. The development of narratology in Arthurian studies brought a fresh approach to these matters and, especially with the works of E. Baumgartner, specialists became more aware of the relation between fictitious authorship and concrete determination of the social background of production and fruition of the romances. The Arthurian pseudonyms constitute a community of clerks and knights who, in ongoing collaboration, endlessly extracted new stories from an inexhaustible ‘livre du latin’. While identities are all imaginary, it is indisputable that they knew each other's texts and that their stories were read in a courtly context very similar to what they depict. The bibliography on this topic is abundant. However, insofar there have been relatively few studies that have analysed this fictitious community from the point of view of textual transmissions or adopted an embracing perspective including the multilingual fortune of the Arthurian novels in prose. In this study we will try to address these two points and show how textual transmission enriches this fictitious community, in an ongoing dialogue with non-fictitious entities and some concrete interlocutors.
'Gender in Early Constructions of Authorship, 1447-1518'
Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 2019
The notion and construction of authorship has been reinterpreted and shaped throughout history. In the Iberian world, the rise of authorial self-consciousness begins to manifest in the early thirteenth century with the gradual rise of vernacular languages as literary lan- guages, which afforded a new understanding of the writer’s craft and place in society. The establishment of decrees within the sixteenth-century book trade reshaped it by making it compulsory to register on the work certain bibliographical details. The turn of the seven- teenth century, furthermore, witnessed a rapid commercialization of the literary product — despite remaining rooted in a system of patronage, literary production began to give way to the active role of printer-publishers and booksellers. Writing for publication was a complex venture for most aspiring authors, to be sure. Nevertheless, literary careers continue to be qualified, chiefly upon gender grounds. This essay, therefore, reflects on the role of gender in early constructions of female au- thorship within Iberian book history, using a critical stance on Christine de Pizan and Teresa de Cartagena, informed by new approaches to the field. The aim is to vindicate the early role of women as authors within the Iberian literary field.
Since the proclamation of his return at the end of the 20 th century, the author reappears in a wide range of different scientific approaches: as a textual category, as a media phenomenon, as a civil person, as the subject of self-fashioning processes, and as an object of external determination.
The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript, 2017
In this essay the development of thePyramusand Thisbe materialistraced from its Ovidian origins via medieval Latin rhetorical exercises, adaptations in French, German, and Dutch and its eventual inclusion in late medieval story collections,notably Chaucer's Legend of Good Wo men and Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris. Finally, the dynamicsofthis universal lovestory is illustrated by the recontextualisation of Thisbe'stale in the Findern manuscript. Attention is paid not only to the meanings generated by new rewritings but also to the manuscript context of each successivev ersion,and consideration is given to possible compilatorial intentions as well as the ways in which its co-texts might haveconditioned its reception. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries the French-, German-, Dutch-, and English-speakingareas of Europe shared acommon literary culture manifesting itself, most obviously, in the adaptation of short and longer narratives into different languages. 1 Most of these stories originated in French, but some had Latin sources, and in the later Middle Ages Italian short narratives also proved influential. 2 Several fabliaux and lays haves urvived in ar ange of European vernaculars, some as independent analogues, others based on earlier sources in a different language. Few of these tales, though, appear in all of the relevant languages, and it is for this reason that Ihavechosen to study medievaladaptations of Ovid's PyramusetThisbe in French, German, Dutch, English, and Italian. 3 It is 1T he Spanish and Scandinavian/Norsematerial is not included here as it lies outside my field of expertiseand wasnot part of our HERA-funded project: the Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from aE uropean Perspective(www.dynamicsofthemedievalmanu script.eu). Italian material wasalso excludedfrom our research, which concentrated on verse rather than prose narratives, but some reference will be made here to Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris. This publication has resulted from the project, which wasfinancially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) and the European Community FP7 2007-2013. 2D empster (1932) argues that some material adapted into Dutch may havecome from Italy or Germany, in the form of both written and oral sources,and that we must not overestimate the role of French in the dissemination of these short narratives. 3S ee Schmitt-vonMühlenfels (1972) for asurvey of its medieval reception history. The Chas-Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0
Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400-1700
Leiden-Boston: Brill (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, vol. 32), 2019
This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. https://brill.com/view/title/54662?lang=en Introduction By: Francesco Venturi Pages: 1–27 1) Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos By: Martin McLaughlin Pages: 28–49 2) Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia By: Jeroen De Keyser Pages: 50–70 3) Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas By: Ian Johnson Pages: 71–98 4) On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry By: Federica Pich Pages: 99–134 5) Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters By: Brian Richardson Pages: 135–164 6) ‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses By: John O’Brien Pages: 165–188 7) Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies By: Harriet Archer Pages: 189–230 8) The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross By: Colin P. Thompson Pages: 231–262 9) Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède By: Russell Ganim Pages: 263–283 10) Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship By: Gilles Bertheau Pages: 284–315 11) Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators By: Joseph Harris Pages: 316–337 12) Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature By: Els Stronks Pages: 338–368 13) Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685) By: Magdalena Ożarska Pages: 369–394 14) Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana By: Carlo Caruso Pages: 395–419 Afterword By: Richard Maber Pages: 420–424