The Work of Attribution in the Age of Anonymous Publication

FAIN: FA-52202-06

David A. Brewer
Ohio State University (Columbus, OH 43210-1349)

THE WORK OF ATTRIBUTION IN THE AGE OF ANONYMOUS PUBLICATION investigates how individual readers in the period and region we tend to credit with the invention of modern authorship--the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic--dealt with that era’s unprecedented proliferation of anonymous and pseudonymous publications. By tracing the sustained negotiations between readers and writers over who had the authority to define an author’s oeuvre and so shape his or her reputation, this book demonstrates that the modern author function is as much the collective creation “from below” of myriad individual readers as it is the product of any of the various institutions or heroic writers to which its invention has been traditionally credited.