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)