This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

This is the first full-length study of the extraordinary period of intense poetic activity in Belfast known as the Ulster Renaissance - a time when young Northern Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, and Paul Muldoon began crafting their art, and tuning their voices through each other. Drawing extensively upon new archival material, as well as personal interviews and correspondence, The Ulster Renaissance argues that these poets' friendships and rivalries were crucial to their autonomous artistic development. The book also sheds new light on the idea of a collaborative Belfast coterie - often treated derisively by critics - and shows that the poets frequently engaged in efforts to promote a cohesive 'Northern' literary community, distinct from that which existed in London and Dublin. It suggests that it was this cohesion - at turns inclusive and confining - which ultimately challenged the Belfast poets to find their individual voices.

Until recently, collaborative authorship has barely been considered by scholars; when it has, the focus has been on discovering who contributed what and who dominated whom in the relationship and in the writing. In Women Coauthors, Holly Laird reads coauthored texts as the realization of new kinds of relationship. Through close scrutiny of literary collaborations in which women writers have played central roles, Women Coauthors shows how partnerships in writing - between two women or between a woman and a man - provide a paradigm of literary creativity that complicates traditional views of both author and text and makes us revise old habits of thinking about writing. Focusing on the social dynamics of literary production, including the conversations that precede and surround collaborative writing, Women Coauthors treats its coauthored texts as representations as well as acts of collaboration. Holly A. Laird discusses a wide array of partial and full coauthorships to reveal how these texts blur or remap often uncanny boundaries of self, status, race, reason, and culture. that of the Delany sisters and Amy Hill Hearth on Having Our Say; lesbian couples whose lives and writings were intertwined, including Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field) and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and the Native American wife-and-husband authors Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Framed in time by the feminist and abolitionist movements of the mid-nineteenth century and the ongoing social struggles surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in the late twentieth century, the partnerships and texts observed in Women Coauthors explore collaboration as a path toward equity, both socioliterary and erotic. For the authors here who collaborate most fully with each other, two are much better than one.

This book explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. It traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print, grappling with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.

This innovative collection challenges the traditional focus on solitary genius by examining the rich diversity of literary couplings and collaborations from the early modern to the postmodern period. Literary Couplings explores some of the best-known literary partnerships—from the Sidneys to Boswell and Johnson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—and also includes lesser-known collaborators such as Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. The essays place famous authors such as Samuel Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats in new contexts; reassess overlooked members of writing partnerships; and throw new light on texts that have been marginalized due to their collaborative nature. By integrating historical studies with authorship theory, Literary Couplings goes beyond static notions of the writing "couple" to explore literary couplings created by readers, critics, historians, and publishers as well as by writers themselves, thus expanding our understanding of authorship.

The past half century has been one of the most active and provocative periods in the long history of textual criticism. In this series of six critical essays that survey theoretical writings in the field since 1950, the eminent textual scholar G. Thomas Tanselle chronicles a significant moment in intellectual history and offers a guide for thinking through the basic issues of textual criticism and scholarly editing.

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