Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Anonymity, Corporate Authority And The Archive: The Production Of Authorship In Late-Victorian England, Rachel Buurma

Rachel S Buurma

This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion of authorship. The plot, language, and paratext of Mary Elizabeth Hawker's pseudonymously published Mademoiselle Ixe, as well as the author-publisher correspondence concerning the novel, offer a representation of the corporate and collective interpretive modes that would have …