Reassessing "Genius" in Studies of Authorship: The State of the Discipline

In his 1840 lecture, "The Hero as Man of Letters," Thomas Carlyle crystallized the Romantic image of the author, which had been developing in English, German, and French aesthetic theory and creative writing since the mid-eighteenth century. Like most commentators on the subject during this era, he defined the author as an autonomous individual inspired by "originality," "sincerity," or "genius." Arguing that the Man of Letters had replaced the Hero-God, Prophet, Poet, and Priest as the predominant form of heroism in the modern age, Carlyle emphasized the recentness as well as the strangeness of this development:

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak-forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the marketplace; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after his death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living,—is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.¹

Novel as it may have been in 1840, this image of the author as hero has proved to be remarkably enduring. In the century and a half since Carlyle's lecture, it has become such a fixed component of the modern consciousness that even the most self-conscious and critical commentators have found it difficult to view authorship any other way.

In the last three or four decades, the Romantic image of the author has been deconstructed and historicized, in light of new theories and methods drawn from poststructuralism, New Historicism, the sociology of literature, and the history of the book. Yet if the most recently published work on the history of authorship is any indication, literary scholars and cultural historians have not entirely exorcised the Romantic figure of the author. Despite its theoretical and methodological sophistication, much of their work continues to reify or (paradoxically) to mask rather than to explicate this figure. However, even as scholars cling to this conception of the author (whether out of habit or out of self-preservation), it has been rendered increasingly problematic by the actualities of authorship at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The current digital revolution in communication has, among other things, exposed the disjunction between the image and the reality of authorship. In particular, it has highlighted the collaborative and derivative nature of much writing. In this context, it is high time to reassess the Romantic depiction of the author as an individual and original "genius."

This essay surveys the historiography of authorship, focusing on books published in the last ten years on authors and author-publisher relations in Britain, France, and the United States since the invention of the printing press. After delineating the main approaches and synthesizing the general conclusions of some of the most recent books in this field, I conclude that the historicist turn in literary studies has done little to advance our understanding of the history of authorship but has, in fact, often served to perpetuate the Romantic notion of genius it purports to critique. To be fair, such a conclusion may stem from my own bias as a historian. But as I see it, scholars of whatever discipline who are interested in authorship would benefit from more sustained attention to the historical record.

The History of the Historiography of Authorship

Long after its emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the...