Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century. Unique to the British eighteenth century, the periodical is of great value to scholars of English cultural studies because it offers a venue where authors hash out, often in extremely dramatic terms, what they think it should take to be a writer, what their relationship with their new mass-media audience ought to be, and what qualifications should act as gatekeepers to the profession. Exploring these questions in The Female Spectator, The Drury-Lane Journal, The Midwife, The World, The Covent-Garden Journal, and other periodicals of the early and mid-eighteenth century, Manushag Powell examines several "paper wars" waged between authors. At the height of their popularity, essay periodicals allowed professional writers to fashion and make saleable a new kind of narrative and performative literary personality, the eidolon, and arguably birthed a new cult of authorial personality. In Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals, Powell argues that the coupling of persona and genre imposes a lifespan on the periodical text; the periodicals don't only rise and fall, but are born, and in good time, they die.
Preface
Chapter 1: Author and Eidolon
I.The periodical life cycle
II.The Eidolon
III.Anonymity?
IV.Genre and the public sphere
V.The performance of authorship; readers as spectators
Chapter 2: Early Periodical Cross-Dressing
I.Lucubrations and sexual identity
II.Release the Crackenthorpes: The embattled Female Tatler
III.War on two fronts: The Female Tatler and the British Apollo
Chapter 3: Performance, Masculinity, and Paper Wars
I.The Fielding-Hill Paper War
II.Acting manly in the Covent-Garden Journal
III.John Hill's failure to fight
IV."Female" warriors enter the fray
V.Eidolons on Stage
Chapter 4: Femininity and the Periodical
I.Confirmed bachelors and spinsters: Eidolons and the problem of marriage
II."Below the Dignity of the human Species:" Establishing authority in Montagu and Haywood
III.The Old Maid: Frances Brooke's "Freeborn Briton" versus the coffee-house Connoisseur
IV.Beyond the spinster: Parrots and other Triflers
Chapter 5: No Animal in Nature so Mortal as an Author, or, Death and the Eidolon
I.The genre from Hell? Printers' Devils and News from the Dead
II.Periodicals as monuments, and the hope of resurrection
III.Corpses, plagiarizers of the dead, and other textual revenants: Grub-Street and Defoe
Bibliography
