This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

This contribution attempts to reconstruct the lost voices of Roman freed persons by focusing on the performative function of literary texts, rather than on their authorship. A study of the performative function of texts considers the contextual motivations of an author’s decision to cite, (re)phrase, and frame freed person’s words, and allows for a nuanced deconstruction of certain passages that might otherwise be labeled merely “elite discourse.” The texts chosen for this analysis are Cicero’s correspondence with Tiro, Tacitus’ historical works, and a letter written by the freed man Timarchides as quoted by Cicero in his oratio against Verres. Ultimately, the contribution’s goal is to suggest a methodological approach that – to some extent – rehabilitates literary texts as evidence for the freed person’s voice, and to argue that the value of literary sources when trying to recover this voice lies specifically in the tension between the public limits of freed persons’ (discursive) agency on the one hand, and the range and inventiveness of their self-representation in the context of their own or their patron’s trust network on the other.

This chapter introduces the so-called ‘profession of letters’ during Swift’s lifetime: an idealised mode of study that included reading and conversing as much as publishing. Like his friend Alexander Pope, Swift defined his writing against a culture of production dependent on cheap popularity, the machinations of booksellers, and government bribery. Swift took aim against this culture in A Tale of a Tub (1704), which bristles with paratexts parodying standard-issue front matter. Unlike Pope, who implicitly acknowledged his status within the commercial print culture of the early eighteenth century, Swift, this chapter argues, always maintained ambivalence towards the literary marketplace.

This chapter provides a biographical overview of Swift’s career. It reconstructs the contexts of Swift’s early life and career in Ireland and England and charts his friendships and allegiances. Swift’s public life was driven, as this chapter shows, by a ‘scribbling itch’ reflected in his twenty-eight crossings of the Irish Sea. But much about his private life remains obscure, not least his relationship with ‘Stella’ and ‘Vanessa’.

This chapter focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to expand a debate on this complex topic. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss to what extent historians should engage the concept of the classic, as has been done for literary and artworks. I will argue that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in historical writing. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts such as durability, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but try to achieve some realities external to the text, they also have to attain some specific features according to this referential content, such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of ‘literariness’.

Beginning in the immediate postwar and coincident with the Paramount antitrust decree, writers of both fiction and screenplays began to insist on the ownership of the works they produced. While flesh-and-blood authors conceived of themselves as corporate bundles of properties, the studios began to behave more like artists, investigating the possibilities of movies geared to specialized audiences. The literariness of these new pictures should be understood as the expression of a new conception of authorship pervading the industry. Many movies now considered noir, including In a Lonely Place (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), manifest the industry’s shifting attitudes toward source material, original screenplays, and, ultimately, the idea of the Hollywood movie as a kind of literary expression. This chapter concludes with an analysis of All About Eve (1950). In its narrative of accommodation and uneasy coherence in the face of a common threat, Eve, unlike In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard, strikes a balance between the conflicting intentions of its director (the self-consciously literary Joseph Mankiewicz) and its studio (Twentieth Century-Fox), giving legible shape to both.

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.

For nearly 300 years, authors of all kinds have expanded the world of Lemuel Gulliver through multiple fifth voyages, spinoffs, mock treatises, verse exchanges, and much more. Close to 200 imitative or supplementary works were produced and reproduced between late 1726 and 1730 alone, and well over 100 in each of the following two decades, the 1730s and 1740s. Most Gulliveriana signals a formal connection with Travels, whether it revisits old settings, fills in perceived gaps in the narrative, or provides additional material. First establishing some common terms and issues in the study of print-based Gulliveriana, this chapter explores the different ways in which secondary writers have filled in and filled out the author-explorer’s world in his name. The final section explores proleptic continuations attributed to Gulliver’s offspring, time-forwarded Gullivers, and other, non-Gulliverian authors.

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.

This chapter discusses the relationship between spelling and writers’ social background, identifying how access to literacy and literacy practices in the history of English contributes to the spelling forms and conventions used in historical texts. It provides an overview of spelling and literacy in Old and Middle Englishes. Gender and social status inflect the spelling evidence from these periods, with the historical manuscripts largely representing the orthographic preferences of elite men, typically linked to religious houses or royal administration. More recent periods provide a broadening picture as access to literacy increases; nevertheless, when analyzing and interpreting historical spelling practices, it is important to recognize the potential skewing of any dataset. The chapter then surveys studies that have attempted to identify authorship on the basis of orthographic evidence. Citing examples from Shakespeare studies, it identifies the potential of this approach, and the need for caution when making pronouncements without an empirical baseline of spelling norms for a period. Finally, the chapter considers the relationship between gender and spelling in the history of English, highlighting negative social attitudes toward women’s spelling in a range of publications, and showing that claims made about women’s practices are not always borne out by empirical analysis.

This chapter looks at scholarly assessment of traditional issues in relation to Proverbs such as provenance, historical and cultural context and literary-critical history across the debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries leading into the twenty-first. Beginning in the nineteenth century when the term “wisdom literature” was coined, changing ideas regarding compositional issues, original social context, and authorship and the effect of key Egyptian parallels on those debates are all discussed.

This essay focuses on Ancrene Wisse and the Ancrene Wisse Group of which this work is part. Ancrene Wisse survives in a significant number of manuscripts, and its place within the literary tradition of medieval women in England seems uncontroversial. However, nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors, many of whom were men, tended to focus on the linguistic significance of these texts, paying little attention to their gendered devotional context. They also placed much greater emphasis on speculation concerning the identity of the male author of Ancrene Wisse than on examining the role of its immediate audience in shaping the work addressed to them. Women scholars working on the Ancrene Wisse Group have, in contrast, tended to be more aware of the importance of the material in relation to the history of womenߣs anchoritism and more open to the possibility of womenߣs authorship of some of the works within this group. The essay suggests that Ancrene Wisse had an expansive direct and indirect influence not only on later texts but also on womenߣs devotional traditions, which, Sauer suggests, may also have extended beyond England.

This essay considers the influence and reception of the writings of Christine de Pizan, whose career was caught up in the Anglo-French conflict of the Hundred Yearsߣ War, as illustrated by her LߣEpistre dߣOthéa, a didactic treatise on chivalry and virtue, and her autobiographical LߣAdvision Christine. Warren explores the shifting significance of the Othéa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, showing that Stephen Scropeߣs English translation reduced female agency and power, changes that reflected wider cultural anxieties concerning female lineage and virtue in the context of Lancastrian claims to the throne. The essay also explores Christineߣs connections to two other powerful women: Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou. By reworking Christineߣs treatments of women to reduce their political power and independent wisdom, translators of Christineߣs works also contained the political threats represented by powerful women. Strikingly, depictions of Christine as author shift her context from the court to the cloister, reaffirming traditionally gendered views of women even while her works continued to be circulated in England.

This essay considers queens and noblewomen as ߢmakersߣ of literary culture from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, a period when they played key roles as patrons and book owners. Women such as Emma of Normandy and Edith of Wessex were involved in the production of and commissioned historical narratives, and were part of a wider Northern European network of culturally sophisticated aristocrats. Further evidence of the importance of understanding continental connections in élite womenߣs literary cultures is provided by Judith of Flanders, who joined the royal court in England and commissioned four highly ornate Gospel Books. Womenߣs literary and religious cultures often overlapped, as is illustrated in the examples of Margaret of Scotland, her daughter Matilda, her granddaughter Matilda, and her sister-in-law Adela, Countess of Blois. Eleanor of Aquitaine may be the most well-known example of a medieval literary patron but her activities were part of a wide-reaching culture of aristocratic womenߣs patronage that stretched across the globe.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.