This project consists of five papers written by five researchers each focusing on a different literary time period from the medieval to the nineteenth century. The first paper on medieval English literature investigates changes in social and material ...
This project consists of five papers written by five researchers each focusing on a different literary time period from the medieval to the nineteenth century. The first paper on medieval English literature investigates changes in social and material contexts in late medieval England and their impact on Geoffrey Chaucer’s works, including _The Man of Law’s Tale_ and _The Legend of Good Women_. A medieval text was a product of collaboration between the writer and those who were involved in its production and circulation; therefore changes in media and the literary market are important in understanding the text. This paper pays particular attention to the increased literacy rate, the development of documentary culture, and the growth of legal circles in the late medieval period as it argues that such changes in literary environment are closely interrelated with the rise of vernacular writers in this period as ‘authors.‘
The research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries aims to explore the material condition of media, market and authors in early modern England by analyzing Thomas Nash’s pamphlets published during his so-called ‘pamphlet war’ with Gabriel Harvey in order to show a mutual interconstitutiveness among media, market, and ‘Author.’ A pamphlet is a unique medium with unconventional and popular marketability, while Nash represents the first-generation professional English writers in the age of the printing press, who conveyed in their works an ambivalent self-consciousness as authors; in consequence, the research on Nashe’s pamphlets and the Nash-Havey pamphlet war will provide a fruitful window to look into the material condition of printing and publishing in this period and the mutual constitutiveness among media, market and ‘Author.’
The research on the first half of the eighteenth century investigates how literary amateurism evolved and competed against the literary market dominated by professional writers who emerged early in the century. This paper reexamines the interconstitutiveness among media, market and ‘Author’ by asking how Alexander Pope, who was one of the most commercially successful writers but paradoxically hated literary markets and its commercialism, and his coteries responded to the appearance of the modern literary market. These writers dreamed of returning to the ideal past in which literary elites and comrades had supported each other even when they garnered great success in the market which they deprecated as a mire. This paper shows that the early eighteenth century was a period of conflict between literary idealism and modern literary markets that viewed literary works as mere commodities.
The research on the second half of the eighteen century revisits fundamental changes in the written culture as it examines contemporary writers’ self-consciousness and literary responses to the establishment of a modern form of literature and the formation of cultural and literary discourses. In particular, this research focuses on women writers such as Jane West, Amelia Opie, Sarah Green, and Isabella Kelly, who wrote mostly for commercialized circulating libraries, in order to trace the contention among different cultural and literary discourses that has scarcely been considered in the studies of eighteen century English literature. This research on those recently discovered eighteenth-century women writers is meaningful not only as an original project but as a part of this joint work that aims to reinvestigate each literary period with a rigorously ‘historicized’ perspective.
The topic of the research on the early 19th century is the fascicle publishing and Charles Dickens, who represents the publication culture of the modern capitalism. This paper examines how this commercialized method of serial publication intersects with the concept of a modern ‘author’ in the production of a text. In Dickens’s works, the relationship among these three elements is not simple or schematic but complex and often paradoxical. By focusing on their relationship, this paper questions the concept of a ‘modern author’ as it analyzes the interconstitutiveness of media, market, and ‘Author,’ and its impact on Dickens’s novels.