Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships (Reading Women Writing) [Paperback]

Bette London (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1999 | Series: Reading Women Writing

Although Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault announced the death of the author several decades ago, critics have been slow to abandon the idea of the solitary writer. Bette London maintains that this notion has blinded us to the reality that writing is seldom an individual activity and that it has led us to overlook both the frequency with which women authors have worked together and the significance of their collaborative undertakings as a form of professional activity. In Writing Double, the first full-length treatment of women's literary partnerships, she goes to the heart of issues surrounding authorial identity.

What is an author? Which forms of authorship are sanctioned and which forms marginalized? Which of these forms have particularly attracted women? Such questions are central to London's analysis of the challenge that women's literary collaboration presents to accepted notions of authorship. Focusing on British texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she considers a fascinating variety of works by largely noncanonical, and in some instances highly unconventional, authors--from the enormously popular novels composed by writing teams at the turn of the century, to the Bront juvenilia and the occult scripts of Georgie Yeats and W. B. Yeats, to automatic writings produced by mediums purporting to be in communication with the spirit world.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

London (English, Univ. of Rochester) examines literary collaboration, especially via mediumship and automatic writing, as it was practiced by women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. London explores the practices of the Bront s and Georgie Yeats's role as medium and author of automatic scripts for her husband, W.B. Yeats. She also pays close attention to the collaborative practices and literary partnerships of intriguing lesser-known authors, such as Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper--a.k.a. "Michael Field"--and Geraldine Cummins, a journalist, fiction writer, and the plaintiff in a copyright court case against a fellow sitter in her s ances. In exploring the issues of feminism, professionalism, secrecy, identity, and copyright in relationship to collaboration and the meaning of authorship, London offers a perspective that should broaden the current discussions of intellectual property, and other publishing issues meshed in the electronic world. For most academic libraries.
-Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080148555X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801485558
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,494,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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