Thousands of Titles Without Authors: Digitized Newspapers, Serial Fiction, and the Challenges of Anonymity

The study of literary anonymity and pseudonymity outside of our existing disciplinary infrastructure raises a variety of questions for book history scholars. How can we study areas of print culture not organized in terms of the relationship between authors and texts, and/or resisting such organization altogether? How can our analyses progress critical debates arising from our existing author-centered perspective without naturalizing that perspective and projecting it onto the past? This article describes how the ongoing digitization of print cultural records, and new methods for accessing and analysing digitized documents, brings to our bibliographic attention not only thousands of new works, but thousands of titles without authors. Using a case study of serial fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers, it articulates a new conceptual and methodological framework for exploring literary anonymity and pseudonymity not predicated on authorship.