Introduction

Name withheld, unattributed, author unknown: the privative way we talk about anonymity says much about the way we construct literary history. For we name as an exception what—on any moderately long view of the genesis of epics and epitaphs, ballads and broadsides, jingles and jokes—we must concede to be the rule. Most texts written as well as oral come, if not out of nowhere, then certainly from nobody, which is to say from that cultural everybody we dub Anon. But during the past half millennium a powerful imperative has arisen to claim by name the territory we survey. This imperative is one of the things we hail as modern in the "early modern" society of the sixteenth century. In the last two centuries it has spread out, from its originally literary basis in the author-function, to sponsor increasingly ambitious conceptions of copyright and increasingly sophisticated corporate invocations of patent law. By now the branded realm that fuses identity with possession has become nearly coextensive with the contemporary order of things.

Several aspects of this propertied regime of the proper name emerge in the essays that make up this issue of New Literary History. One is the historical range the essays cover. Finding its terminus ad quem in the present, our narrative concludes with a post-proprietary rhapsody by Lisa Samuels, whose abode is the footnote but whose real habitat is the Internet, a utopian venue that raises with particular insistence the question who owns what. Our narrative begins at the other end of modernity in the early 1600s, with Marcy North's discussion of the Apologie of King James I, and proceeds to Pat Rogers' illustration of the ingenuity with which Alexander Pope manipulated the terms of his poetic celebrity. Long before the era of modern copyright Pope, having made a name for himself, feigned anonymity as a roundabout means of affirming his eminence. These maneuverings mark an early watershed in the broadening course of a larger cultural change, as social authority migrated from the politics of inherited rank to a renown that was negotiated within the culture of the marketplace. Such royal sovereignty as James I had doffed—subjecting himself, in the process, to a print culture whose secular and democratic rule he, like his Stuart heirs, fatally underestimated—gave way to authors' legal and economic stake in their own work, which epitomized the sovereignty of the liberal self iv and which also, around the turn of the nineteenth century, started producing "royalties" of another kind.

That was when, with the advent of a mass-cultural reading public, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron boosted sales through the practice of an anonymity that, being merely nominal, struck readers as the best of incentives to brand loyalty. It was also when the numerous romantic poets discussed here in complementary essays by Lee Erickson and Paula Feldman claimed, disclaimed, or reclaimed authorship in gendered patterns of response to the still unsettled prestige that a new publishing dispensation was attaching to authorial exposure—in the indecorous sense of social notoriety yet also the promotional sense of celebrity. The latter sense prevailed with the advancing nineteenth century, about which our contributors are largely silent because anonymity then fell on hard times. For the acme of western individualism, and of a print culture largely unrivaled by other media, was the age not of Anon. but of Stendhal and George Sand, Lewis Carroll and Michael Field. It proved much more hospitable, that is, to pseudonymous than to anonymous books, the latter tending moreover toward the eponymous (Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, anon. 1855) or cryptonomous (that easy riddle the technically anonymous 1855 Leaves of Grass), and the former toward a secrecy that was peculiarly open (Marian Evans basking in the eminence of George Eliot's career). Alessandro Manzoni's invented hero the Innominato (I Promessi Sposi, 1825-42) and Christina Rossetti's paradoxically outspoken recluse the "Monna Innominata" (1881) both appeared in books that identified the author directly on the title page.

And yet this flowering of...