Dubiously Donne: Attribution and Literary Reputation in Early Modern England

FAIN: FEL-294484-24

Lara Massey Crowley, PhD
Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL 60115-2828)

Research and writing of a book on misattributed early modern English texts and how such misattributions reflect ideas about authorship, reputation, reader taste, and canon formation.

My book project, "Dubiously Donne: Attribution and Literary Reputation in Early Modern England," explores early attitudes toward authorial identification through analyzing poetry and prose mis-attributed to writers such as John Donne in seventeenth-century handwritten manuscripts. I have uncovered hundreds of mis-attributed texts (or “dubia”), once-popular works that can be complex, lyrical, even scandalous. Studying dubia illuminates early modern notions of authorship, literary canon formation, literary reputations, and reader interests–topics of interest to those studying early modern British literature, politics, religion, or culture. This book aims to locate dubia on the scholarly map, making many texts buried in local record offices and small libraries available to the public for the first time. It demonstrates how investigating dubia enhances our understanding of early modern–and perhaps modern–artistic creation, reception, and authorial “ownership.”