Ezell 1999

Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

"the history of authorship in late-seventeenth-century Britain and in particular the history of manuscript transmission of literary texts have been delineated and controlled by a set of metaphors based on assumptions about class and technology and on gender and technology. In this story about authorship, print publication takes on the heroic role of the revolutionary force, usually represented by male writers eager to seize new opportunities, while manuscript culture has the role of the villain -- the elitist, snobby aristocrat, very often a woman, clinging to long-outmoded forms in a futile attempt to retain control and power. In contrast to these existing interpretations of the heroic, democratizing impact of print technology in the seventeenth century, I explore in the following set of essays the cultural world of the script author and the 'hidden' female participation in it both as author and as reader." (11)

"we still need studies that are not focused on the 'advanced' or modern concept of authorship during this period of transition but instead on all the varied aspects of the material culture of literature, especially as they are affected by geographic location and by the gender of the writer or the reader." (12)

"What all of these theoretical models of authorship in the past do, in spite of their differences, is to erase the notion of manuscript authorship that did not have as its primary aim a commercial readership and, likewise, any sense of a culture of reading adn writing in which it was engaged. Instead, the notion of author found in these disparate studies tends to dismiss non-commercial texts as 'aristocratic', 'amateur', and 'vulnerable'." (17)

"In the same way that we have theorized authorship before having a good descriptive model of scribal practices, we have tended to analyze early modern authorship as if region made little difference." (18)

The Social Author: Manuscript Culture, Writers, and Readers

"Suppose an author, living in a small village in the 1650s or even as late as the 1690s, wrote a poem: What were his or her options to secure readers? What are the terms and models we have available to describe the experience of authorship in this period? How have the terms that have been used to narrate the process of authorship and progress of print shaped our perspectives on past experiences and our expectations about early modern literary culture?" (22)

"Instead of seeking to describe the activities of the author and his or her manuscripts before they are forever fixed in print, current studies of manuscripts from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have instead focused on their relationship to print culture and how best to convert them to print volumes." (23)

"What has been left out of existing literary histories of the Restoration and early eighteenth century is a sense of authorship and readers that existed independently from the conventions and the restrictions of print and commercial texts." (24)