Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Authorship

“Between Geniuses and Brain-Suckers: Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-century Authorship”. Guest Editor: Sören Hammerschmidt

This special issue of Authorship seeks to explore the evolution of authorship across the long eighteenth century. The gradual development of a remunerative literary marketplace – driven by an expanding, economically viable periodical press as well as by authors’ greater abilities to leverage new copyright regimes – led to a process of professionalization that was fundamentally at odds with the traditional ideal of leisured authorship. The eighteenth-century economic realities of professional writers shaped competing conceptions of literary authorship. The stereotypes of the suffering Grub Street hack and of the Romantic genius represent two extremes, but situated and often alternating between these poles, a host of options presented themselves to those who would earn their living by writing.

Some of the topics which “Between Geniuses and Brain-Suckers: Problematic Professionalism in Eighteenth-century Authorship” aims to investigate include, but are not limited to:

• Authorship and the eighteenth-century marketplace; authors and patrons; authors in networks; authorship and intellectual property.
• Eighteenth-century authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated, polyglot.
• Niche authors: dramatists, memoirist(e)s, novelists, poets, journalists, critics, satirists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists.
• Gender and eighteenth-century authorship: interrogating putative “feminine” and “masculine” models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.
• The growth of the professional author in the eighteenth century: the hack and the pamphleteer; the gentle author; the anonymous author; rogue and radical authors.
• The impact of the new periodical press on (self-)constructions of authors and authorship.

Please send inquiries, expressions of interest, and submissions to the editors at authorshipjournal@gmail.com.

Finished submissions will be due 30 October 2014, and will be double-blind peer reviewed in accordance with journal policy; the issue itself will be published in the spring of 2015. For author guidelines, see www.authorship.ugent.be/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

source: http://www.sharpweb.org/event/cfp-special-issue-problematic-professionalism-in-eighteenth-century-authorship/

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