Authorship

The journal aims to offer a venue in which to describe diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship, and to grapple with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or interdependence, and self-fashioning. The Romantic or New Critical concept of the solitary genius or auteur (if indeed such an entity ever existed at all) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and revision; as a result, what the general public might once have thought of as authorial agency is now submerged in an elaborate tissue of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents of publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. In analyzing cultural formations of 'authoriality' as they developed historically, over a long period of time and in a variety of geographical locations, in relation to cultural networks and social change, to transformations of the media, as well as to changing perceptions of gender and personhood, Authorship hopes to foster a more refined and precise theoretical and historical understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that transform a writer into an author. We therefore welcome articles in on the cultural performance of authorship in any contemporary or historical literary milieu. We try to accommodate all languages, and can handle submissions in Dutch, English, French, German, modern Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Scandinavian languages. If you have a submission for us in another language, please do contact us, so we may evaluate our ability to process it. Topics include, but are not limited to: - Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated, polyglot. - Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists. - Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution. - Authorship and the canon. - Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine" models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published. - Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and reception of authors. - Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae. - Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and cultural networks. - The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of authors. - Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of authorial performances. - Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and intellectual property. - The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers. - Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).