This volume adds a new dimension to authorship studies by linking the editorial tradition to the transformative reception of early modern authors and their works across time. Aleida Auld argues that the editorial tradition provides privileged access to the reception of early modern literature, informing our understanding of certain reconfigurations and sometimes helping to produce them between their time and our own. At stake are reconfigurations of oeuvre and authorship, the relationship between the author and work, the relationship between authors, and the author’s own role in establishing an editorial tradition. Ultimately, this study recognizes that the editorial tradition is a stabilizing force while asserting that it may also be a source of strange and provocative reconceptions of early modern authors and their works in the present day. Scholars and students of early modern literature will benefit from this approach to editing as a form of reception that encompasses all the editorial decisions that are necessary to ‘put forth’ a text.

In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged 'metaphysical' poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having 'discovered' Donne himself. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century tracks the myriad ways in which 'Donne' was lodged in literary culture in the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be 'in the hands of every reader'; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of the only edition ever called The Works, which reprinted the sermons of 'Dr Donne'. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the 'fleshly school' of poets, and by self-consciously 'decadent' writers of the fin de siècle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the seventeenth-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called 'the masterpiece of English biography'.