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Authorship
The peer-reviewed, open access e-journal Authorship,planned to go online in the summer of 2011 and to appear twice a year, isseeking submissions for its inaugural issue. The journal aims to offer a venuein which to describe diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship,and to grapple with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence orinterdependence, and self-fashioning. The Romantic or New Critical concept ofthe solitary genius or auteur (if indeed such an entity ever existed at all)has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and revision;as a result, what the general public might once have thought of as authorialagency is now submerged in an elaborate tissue of critical feedback, textualinstability, editorial intervention, and accidents of publishing, branding, andspin. And yet the Author persists, as a nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, asa biographical entity, as a popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativityand innovation. In analyzing cultural formations of 'authoriality' as they developedhistorically, over a long period of time and in a variety of geographicallocations, in relation to cultural networks and social change, totransformations of the media, as well as to changing perceptions of gender andpersonhood, Authorship hopes to foster a more refined and precise theoretical and historicalunderstanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processesthat transform a writer into an author. We therefore welcome articles in English on the cultural performanceof authorship in any contemporary or historical literary milieu.
Topics include, but arenot limited to:
- Authorship across and within diverse languages,literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic,transnational, translated, polyglot.
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists,poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, publicintellectuals, moralists.
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.
- Authorship and the canon.
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative"feminine" and "masculine" models of writing,self-fashioning, and getting published.
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; theself-creation, branding and reception of authors.
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorialpersonae.
- Authors and collaboration; single and multipleauthors. Authors and culturalnetworks.
- The quotidian activities of writers as theyrelate to the public image of authors.
- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewingconsidered as kinds of authorial performances.
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors andpatrons; authorship and intellectual property.
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors,publishers, and printers.
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship& new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).
Submissions may be sent to the editors (mailto:authorship@ugent.be). Therecommended length for articles is about 5,000 words, and the deadline to beconsidered for inclusion in the first issue is 1 May, 2011. See the website of Authorshipat http://www.authorship.ugent.be/for more information and to sign up for email notification of futureissues.
This journal is an initiative of the Researchproject on Authorship as Performance (RAP). For further information, visit http://www.rap.ugent.be/