Manuscript, Print and Early-Modern Authorship - Detailseite

In the last decade of the 16^th and the beginning of the 17^th century two interrelated developments took place that changed the way literature, the social place of the poet/writer and literary authority were conceived of. On the one hand, there is a crisis in the (aristocratic) system of patronage that up to that point economically and culturally sustained literary production and distribution. On the other hand, the advent of print and the rise of the merchant class started to involve literary production in, or threatened to subject it to, the dynamics and logic of the pre-capitalist market. This not only produced a number of cultural anxieties, but also enabled or necessitated new forms of positionings and (self-)authorisations for writers. From notions such as the “self-crowned laureates” (Richard Helgerson) to the “imprint of gender” (Wendy Wall), this seminar will look at how poets, writers and dramatists tried to rhetorically and textually accommodate these new medial, social and economic conditions of literary production and distribution in various paratexts, but also within the texts and their structure themselves. On the basis of an investigation into the mediatheoretical differentiations between and implications of orality and literacy as well as manuscript and print cultures, the course aims at understanding how, in these few decades, poets and writers laid claims to literary authority and cultural power that eventually led to a new concept of authorship in such writers as Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanier or Margaret Cavendish across the different genres of poetry, drama, pamphlet prose and the new form of the essay.

Please be aware that this course will be held as a three-hour class, so that we will have both the seminar (2 hours) and the reading course (1 hour) every week.