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"Our reliance on one another, whether on this plane or another, is what can never be explained. There have been many empty moments, long spaces of silence, both grappling with the same intangible idea. Sometimes the compelling creative urge would come on both, and we would try to reconcile the two impulses, searching for a form into which best to cast them-one releasing it, perhaps as a cloudy suggestion, to be caught up by the other, and given form and colour, then to float away in a flash of certainty, a completed sentence-as two dancers will yield to the same impulse, given by the same strain of music, and know the joy of shared success."--
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Adam Smith's liberal sympathy; 2. 'O you pretty Pecksie!': The collaborative process of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley; 3. Written-visual aesthetics: The Rossettis and the Pre-Raphaelites; 4. Typographical adventures: William Morris, community, and the Kelmscott Press; 5. Sim and Puss: The sympathetic mirroring of Michael Field; 6. Towards empathy: Vernon Lee's psychological aesthetics; Conclusion.
About the author
Heather Bozant Witcher is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century poetics, collaboration, and sociability, as well as archival theory and digital humanities. She is the co-editor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020) and was the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies.
Summary
Celebrating plurality in collaboration and underscoring the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing, Heather Witcher draws on a range of examples to show the myriad ways, both social and material, in which nineteenth-century authors interacted and co-created. Ultimately, this study overhauls how we view authorship itself.
Foreword
Examining social and material dimensions of collaboration, this book reveals the diverse networks of nineteenth-century literary exchange.
