Metaphors of Authorship: Eighteenth-Century Novelists’ Imaginations of the Reading Publics, 1740–1810

Abstract

This dissertation examines the complex ways eighteenth-century writers define authorship in relation to various actors in the scribal and print culture. In the works of a number of central British authors, I trace the construction of authorial identities in metaphors of cultivation and birthing, which compare the author-work relationship to those of farmer-land and parent-child respectively. Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, informed by their different relationships with land as a landed bookseller (Richardson) and a pastor (Sterne), transpose the cultivation metaphor into the domains of garden and parish respectively. With the grafting metaphor, Richardson compares the parodies of his Pamela and the literary criticism on Shakespeare to sexual violations that depreciate a work's monetary and literary values. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne uses the settlement metaphor to defend his borrowings, and I demonstrate how his questioning of the Lockean labor theory of property leads him to imagine an authorship modeled on poor relief and parochial sociality. Frances Burney and Anna Letitia Barbauld contend, in different ways, with the patriarchal history of the birthing metaphor where male authors claim to birth works. By peeling off the meanings of “cipher” layered onto the text and paratexts of Evelina, we see how Burney uses the cipher metaphor to transpose the question of women's patriarchal affinities to a celebration of female authorship. Barbauld bypasses the patrilineal in her prefaces to women novelists in her anthology The British Novelists and identifies women with dissenters, a strategy, I argue, that emphatically associates women authors with the print culture.