ENGL 5331 Eighteenth‑Century Constructions of Authorship

Instructor: Trevor Ross

"The present age, if we consider chiefly the state of our own country, may be stiled with great propriety The Age of Authors."  — Samuel Johnson

          Hack, bard, dunce, scribbler, wit, bays, man of letters:  the figure of the author appeared in many incarnations during the eighteenth century, some heroic and celebratory, others far less flattering.  This seminar is about how writers of the period conceived of their calling, how they presented themselves in their work, and how they deployed representations of authorship to express anxieties over the status of literary culture.  These anxieties were driven by seismic changes in the conditions for writing, which went from being an activity heavily subservient upon patronage and state regulation to a profession served by a commercial bookselling trade, a broad reading public, and a new regime of intellectual property.  Responding to these changes, authors mythologized their art, caricatured their rivals, donned masks of anonymity and pseudonymity, peddled literary memoirs, formulated theories of originality and genius, or laboured in Grub Street garrets.

            We will examine several of these representations, among them Rochester’s female ventriloquism in A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country; self-defenses by Behn, Dryden and Finch; Swift’s corrosive burlesque of modern authorship in A Tale of a Tub; Pope’s self-dramatization in the epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot, as well as his apocalyptic satire on print culture, The Dunciad; Johnson’s Life of Savage and the mythology of “Grub Street”; Young’s epochal Conjectures on Original Composition; the phenomenon of Bardolatry; primitivist championing of natural genius by such later poets as Gray, Collins and Yearsley; and Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the greatest literary biography in the language.  We will also consider more recent accounts of authorship, notably Foucault’s essay on “What is an Author?” and some historical studies of print culture during the eighteenth century.