Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama

Of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening of human sensibility . . . of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before. . . . Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown. . . . Therefore to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect.

—William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface ¹

We owe our modern idea of an author to the radical reconceptualization of writing which came to fruition in this [Essay, Supplementary to the Preface] of 1815.

—Martha Woodmansee, “The Author Effect I” ²

The recent explosion of historical studies on authorship and copyright have found a convenient high-water mark in the years we traditionally consider as the Romantic Period. “[A]uthorship . . . is a relatively recent formation,” the introduction to a recent collection of essays, The Construction of Authorship (1994), tells us, “that culminated less than 200 years ago in the heroic self-presentation of Romantic poets.” ³ The vast majority of this new work—by legal historians like Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel, and by cultural historians like Vincent Desroches, Terry Eagleton, John Feather, Peter Jaszi, Mark Rose, Marlon Ross, Jack Stillinger, and Martha Woodmansee—has endeavored to trace in eighteenth-century British and European culture the processes by which the modern notion of “Author” came into being. ⁴ In doing so, these critics take up the call Michel Foucault made in “What Is an Author?” when he asked literary critics and historians to re-examine their own notions of authorship by placing it in its eighteenth-century context. ⁵

In responding to Foucault’s challenge, these studies have argued—compellingly, I think—that the modern author, that “individual solely responsible . . . for the production of a unique, original work,” is an economic entity, a product of the larger transition from patronage-based to market-based systems of writing and remuneration. ⁶ As might be expected in multiple critical studies investigating multiple national literatures, the various authors of these studies emerge from different geographical locations and at different historical moments. Alain Strowel, for example, in “Droit d’auteur and Copyright: Between History and Nature,” links the emergence of the modern author in France to the bourgeois elevation of property and destruction of aristocratic privilege that accompanied the American and French Revolutions. ⁷ Eagleton and Woodmansee both find modern authorship in the strand of German aesthetic philosophy associated with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1781) and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1797), and in the essays of Edward Young, Edmund Burke, and David Hume. Ross locates the author’s legitimacy in the authenticating practices of the British antiquarians, while Feather and Rose locate it in the legal battles over copyright that occurred between British booksellers throughout the eighteenth century.

Amidst such a rich diversity of critical investigation, however, it is surprising to find the majority of studies sharing in what is not so much a common teleology as a kind of mutually-agreed-upon meeting place of ideological excess called “Romanticism”—a site they embody most frequently in the later Wordsworth. All of the complexity of changing political structures, of changing legal climates responding to changing demographics of reading, and of changing economics of book production result in a coherent ideological response intimately related to Romanticism. Woodmansee calls the author a “high romantic idea” whose trajectory begins in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and reaches maturity in Wordsworth’s 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface. ⁸ Eagleton’s broad study of the aesthetic identifies the author as a fundamentally “Romantic doctrine.” ⁹ Taking up Eagleton’s argument, Rose renames the modern author the “Romantic ‘author’” and places this author in court, represented in the bud by Pope and in full flower by Wordsworth, who as early as 1808 is arguing openly for reform of copyright laws, and...