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.
Recommended Citation
Spencer, Seth, "Assembled Authorship: American Women Writers and the Culture of Commonplacing" (2023). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2726.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2726