Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

1-1-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in English

First Advisor

Cristin Ellis

Second Advisor

Caroline Wigginton

Third Advisor

Katie McKee

School

University of Mississippi

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

“Assembled Authorship: American Women Writers and the Culture of Commonplacing” interrogates monolithic conceptions of authorship in the nineteenth century by exploring the expressive capacity of commonplace bookmaking practices for authors marginalized by race and/or gender. “Assembled Authorship” examines the influence of commonplace book culture on the novels of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Hannah Crafts, and Fanny Fern—authors who intervene in debates on religious reform, abolition, and antebellum periodical culture. Utilizing research grants from Penn State University and the University of New England, “Assembled Authorship” places high-resolution scans of commonplace books recovered from archives in conversation with the intertextual works of Phelps, Crafts, and Fern. In doing so, this study stages the period’s complex networks of reprinting, recirculation, and recontextualization reflected in commonplace bookmaking practices as a critical framework for imagining a hybrid mode of authorship forged at the intersection of acts of reading and writing. “Assembled Authorship” asks us to consider how some nineteenth-century novels share distinct formal properties with commonplace books and, importantly, how their authors use these properties to engage with the social issues that animated their worlds.

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