silva rerum

as when Women, wondrous fond of place

Considering that the Restoration and Eighteenth Century is my favour­ite period of English Literature, the term paper I penned for ENGL 357 for Dr. Scott MacKenzie was a rather piti­ful attempt over­all. Dr. MacKenzie ended up giv­ing me a reas­on­ably high grade (though, in my opin­ion, unjus­ti­fi­ably so) for the paper so I felt a little bet­ter. I really wish I could view my final exam­in­a­tion essays though – the essays I wrote on the char­ac­ters of the Rake and the Coquette and their par­al­lel evol­u­tions through Restoration and Eighteenth Century lit­er­at­ure was much more inter­est­ing than this.

Incidentally, Dr. MacKenzie is cur­rently teach­ing a sec­tion of ENGL 358 focus­ing exclus­ively on the char­ac­ters of the Rake and the Coquette this year.

Schools for Scandal: Trends in Collaborative Authorship dur­ing the Augustan Era

Introduction

Particularly in the cur­rent post-​Romantic schol­arly milieu, Inge notes that lit­er­ary aca­dem­ics con­tinue to “main­tain the tra­di­tional image of the author as an indi­vidu­al­ist up against a mater­ial world, try­ing to cre­ate some­thing pure and unsul­lied” (623). Stillinger adopts an even stronger pos­i­tion, not­ing that con­tem­por­ary schol­ars are guilty of reify­ing the author as a lone­some prodigy, of sub­scrib­ing to “the romantic myth of the author as a sol­it­ary genius” (202). Others, such as Foucault and Barthes, have attemp­ted to instead ban­ish or sug­gest the death of the author, sever­ing the con­nec­tion between authors and their works (Stillinger v). Adherence to either image, the sol­it­ary author or the dead author, is largely incom­pat­ible with attempts to study lit­er­at­ure of the Augustan era which, accord­ing to Griffin, was char­ac­ter­ized by “[a] higher incid­ence of collaboration…than at any time in the his­tory of English lit­er­at­ure” (1). This fre­quency of col­lab­or­a­tion, con­tin­ues Griffin, “can tell us some­thing import­ant about the lit­er­ary world that the Augustans inhab­ited, a world dif­fer­ent from our own, and requir­ing that we approach it with prop­erly adjus­ted crit­ical pre­con­cep­tions” (1), that is to say, pre­con­cep­tions that do not pre­sup­pose the myth of the sol­it­ary author or the absent author. This paper, then, seeks to invest­ig­ate the ways in which rede­fin­ing exist­ing paradigms of author­ship may lead to mean­ing­ful insight into new ways of study­ing lit­er­at­ure of the Augustans, par­tic­u­larly that of Dryden and Pope. Moreover, this paper will attempt to trace pat­terns of col­lab­or­a­tion by attempt­ing to identify the types of lit­er­ary col­lab­or­a­tion, based upon authorial inten­tion and motiv­a­tion, pre­val­ent in the early and late Augustan periods.

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