Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation

Heather Bozant Witcher

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781009075701
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Bringing the collaborative process to life through an array of examples, Heather Witcher shows that sympathetic co-creation is far more than the mere act of writing together. While foregrounding the material aspects of collaboration – hands uniting on the page, blank space left for fellow contributors, the writing and exchanging of drafts – this study also illuminates its social aspects and its reliance on Victorian liberalism: dialogue, the circulation of correspondence, the lived experience of collaboration, and, on a less material plane, transhistorical collaborations with figures of the past. Witcher takes a broad approach to these partnerships and, in doing so, challenges traditional expectations surrounding the nature of authorship itself, not least its typical classification as a solitary activity. Within this new framework, collaboration enables the titles of 'coauthor, ' 'influencer, ' 'editor, ' 'critic, ' and 'inspiration' to coexist. This book celebrates the plurality of collaboration and underscores the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Adam Smith’s Liberal Sympathy
• Chapter 2 “O You Pretty Pecksie!”: The Collaborative Process of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Chapter 3 Written–Visual Aesthetics: The Rossettis and the Pre-Raphaelites
• Chapter 4 Typographical Adventures: William Morris, Community, and the Kelmscott Press
• Chapter 5 Sim and Puss: The Sympathetic Mirroring of Michael Field
• Chapter 6 Towards Empathy: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index