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  • Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship
Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 373 pp. $60.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Although the Author, that is the single author once idealized as the genius behind the book, was proclaimed dead decades ago, new studies of authorship deepen our understanding of the implications of this proclamation. In recent literary theory and history, the book has become a text produced not by a person but within a network. In this new paradigm, collaborative writing practices—broadly understood to include intertextuality, textual editing, joint authorship, and even audience response—are the real engines of literary production. Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, offers a compelling case for this reconceptualization of authority.

Literary Couplings is an ambitious book. The introduction, written by its editors, charts the developments in textual analysis and historical scholarship that have worked to depose the single author, and their valuable conclusion provides a review of critical scholarship in the field. Throughout, the editors emphasize the interdisciplinarity of new theoretical work on authorship. They also use a neologism—authors are "heterotexts" (p. 19)—in hopes of displacing the gender binaries that often retrospectively turn writing collaborations into conventional couplings in which a masculinized, dominant subject is assisted by a feminized partner. Of course, the term "hetero" conjures up the specter of this normative sexual pairing, so Stone and Thompson must explain, "Our use of 'heterotextual' is predicated on the value of preserving the older root meanings of 'hetero' as 'mixed,' 'heterogeneous,' 'diverse'. . ." (p. 19). More effective than the term "heterotextual," the essays included in Literary Couplings demonstrate that authority is a confluence of influences and collaborations.

To provide a representative sampling of the heterogeneous contexts and practices that have shaped authorship during the regime of the author (described by the editors as a several-hundred-year period from the sixteenth century until the twentieth), Literary Couplings includes thirteen strong essays. The book is divided into five sections and proceeds chronologically. The first section, "Early Modern 'Coupled Worke,'" presents two essays, one by Patricia Demers on the deferred literary alliance between Sir [End Page 339] Philip Sidney and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, which informs the production of the Sidney Psalms, and the second by John B. Radner on how Johnson and Boswell cooperated and competed as each wrote about their trip to Hebrides. The section that follows, "Romantic Joint Labor," offers Gerard Goggin's essay on the complex sexual politics involved in William Godwin's editing of the Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria left unfinished at her death; Anne B. Wallace's study of the links between housework and literary work in the construction of Wordsworth's literary authority, a collaborative production in which his sister Dorothy played a crucial role; and Alison Hickey's analysis of Sara Coleridge's editorial work as a kind of collaboration that installed her father as a solitary genius.

"Victorian Complementarities and Crosscurrents," the third section, features a joint inquiry into the "poetical and textual relations" of the Brownings by Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone, followed by Jill Matus's essay on two Orientalist and familial collaborative projects that highlight the performance and subversion of gendered authorship: Sarah Poole's work with her brother, Egyptologist Edward William Lane, and Isabel Burton's "woman's edition" of her husband's translation of The Arabian Nights (pp. 151, 176). The final essay of this section is another collaborative effort, this time by Robert Gray and Christopher Keep, and its subject is the challenge to authorial propriety posed by the communal authorship of Teleny, a queer text emphasizing the homoerotic sharing of identities that is its subject and discursive system. The next section is "Literary Modernity: Mythmakers and Muses," which includes essays by Lisa Harper on the competitive collaboration between W. B. Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley and by Amber Vogel on Robert Graves's effacement of his collaborative work with Laura Riding. The final section, "Writing Back: Postcolonial and Contemporary Contestation and Retrospection," begins with Rebecca Carpenter's examination of Maitreyi Devi's complex assertion of authorial power in her rewriting of Mircea Eliade's Bengal Nights (his version of their shared story). This essay is followed by Sarah Churchwell's exploration of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, a text shaped by the need to "correct Sylvia Plath" and thus manipulate the reception of their intertwined work (p. 261). In the last piece, Lorraine York explores anxieties about public visibility, the feeling of constraint in cultural space, experienced by lesbian writing pairs. Her essay first examines two sets of nineteenth-century collaborators, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (who signed themselves "Michael Field") and the coauthors Edith Somerville and Violet Martin. York then shifts to a study of three contemporary and cross-cultural writing partners, Ayanna Black and Lee Maracle, Gillian Hanscombe and Suniti Namjoshi, and Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, who find tensions created by nation and culture as potent as those created in the Victorian period by gender and sexuality.

Obviously, given the breadth and variety of these essays, readers are likely [End Page 340] to dip into the volume prompted by their own interests, but they will find it hard to pull themselves out. The essays are interesting not only because they challenge the regime of the author but because they show how practices of collaboration also depend upon and maintain the idea of the author. "One of the key issues," as the editors point out, is "the difficulty of determining where singular authorship ends and collaboration begins" (p. 25).

The strategies each essay uses to negotiate this difficulty are fascinating. For example, exploring what Patricia Demers calls "deferred collaboration" (p. 43), several essays (Demers' essay on Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke and others on Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Samuel Coleridge and his daughter Sara, and on Plath and Hughes) are riveting in their analyses of the way in which the work and identity of a deceased author can be shaped into coherence by the editing work of a surviving relative. With varying success, both Godwin and Hughes used their power as literary executors to censor and revise their wives' radical writing and threatening authority. Alison Hickey's discussion of Sara Coleridge's work on her father's fragmentary manuscripts is a compelling account of the way in which this collaborative strategy can create the figure of the great author.

Yet readers are likely to wonder if editing a deceased author's work and posthumously fashioning that author's identity counts as coauthorship. Some readers might find this new definition of collaboration a bit of a stretch, even while acknowledging the importance of this mode of literary production. Similarly, Wallace's essay, a probing study of the domestic ideologies constructing William and Dorothy Wordsworth as "joint (and equal) laborers in a domestic economy in which texts were produced as a cooperative enterprise" cannot dispel questions about whether or not domestic support should count as coauthorship (p. 28). Despite the excellence of these essays, then, readers could still walk away with their notions of the great author intact. Interestingly, the essay deploying the most familiar strategy is perhaps the most disruptive of traditional notions of authorship. Performing a feminist exposé, Amber Vogel reveals Robert Graves's self-proclaimed genius as a flattering fiction made possible by his appropriation of the work of his unacknowledged collaborator, the poet Laura Riding.

Consistently convincing are discussions of actual collaboration, particularly the essay that foregrounds its own collaborative dynamic, Corinne Davies and Marjorie Stone's "'Singing the Song': The Brownings 'in the Poetic Relation.'" Rather than using a traditional academic format, the two coauthors exchange letters that explore the interactions of the Brownings in producing their poetry, even as Davies and Stone acknowledge their own interactions while creating their essay. The dialogic form of the letter exchange decenters this exploration, providing an innovative way to illuminate the poetry. Still, letters maintain the role of the individual author as origin, while coauthors who produce a single work together often create a [End Page 341] text with a voice that does not belong to any single contributor—although the intersubjective and cross-cultural encounters that form the collaborative text may lead to tensions as well as harmonious blendings. Both Rebecca Carpenter's essay, "Competing Versions of a Love Story: Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi," and York's essay on lesbian collaborations underscore the way a shared text may be a place to acknowledge rather than elide differences. As York notes, collaborations, especially lesbian literary collaborations, are out of the closet yet still offer "an uneasy negotiation of shared textual space as utopian frontier" (p. 289).

For those of us interested in the collective fashioning of authority, Literary Couplings performs a great service by contextualizing writing partnerships and by convincingly advocating the "need for multiple theoretical models" of collaboration in essays that look back to the past and forward to the future (p. 315). Acknowledging the influence of the expanding world wide web, a digital space where both utopian practices of collaborative authorship and dystopian technologies of surveillance shape the landscape, the editors conclude, "the history of literary coupling and collaboration may yet offer up a more dynamic and heteromorphic prospect than we might initially have assumed" (p. 330). What's next? One answer is more challenges to the paradigm of solitary authorship. Literary Couplings points the way.

Janice Doane
St. Mary's College Devon Hodges, George Mason University

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