Much has been written recently about the important changes in understandings of authorship and literary labour in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 argues that the collaborative novels of this period were instrumental to that reconstruction. More than just a gimmick, these novels (there were dozens published between The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner and The Sturdy Oak (1917) by Mary Austin, Kathleen Norris, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Henry Kitchell Webster, et. al. ) were a serious attempt to work through the anxieties authors faced in an ever more competitive and business-like market. By examining the issues surrounding collaborative production of writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, Ashton demonstrates that in union there was strength.

An exciting new contribution to the expanding but still largely uncharted territory of collaboration studies, Late Victorian Literary Collaboration is the first book-length study of the trend for collaborative writing that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As a result of the rapidly growing literary market, the years between 1870 and the turn of the century witnessed an unprecedented flow of collaboratively written novels. In the 1890s, co-authorship became a craze, with literary partnerships multiplying and fiction co-written by twenty and more authors appearing in the pages of popular magazines. By 1900, however, the trend had already reversed, and it quickly slipped into oblivion. Late Victorian Literary Collaboration investigates the factors that made the period so conducive to collaboration, tracing the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. Drawing on a vast range of original sources, the book discusses and compares different models of collaboration, from life-long, exclusive partnerships to one-time, widely-advertised collaborative ventures between best-selling novelists. It deals with authors such as Walter Besant, Somerville and Ross, Andrew Lang, H.R. Haggard and Rhoda Broughton, all favourites of the Victorian public but subsequently neglected and only recently reevaluated. By unpacking the debate that developed around co-authorship in the periodical press of the time, the book also sheds light on how collaborative authorship was imagined by the general public, and illustrates how the trend effectively – if temporarily – challenged Victorian assumptions about the author as a solitary genius.

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this volume offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. While each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention, taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which it was always in the process of vanishing. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

In Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace, David Dowling examines an often-overlooked aspect of the history of publishing -- relationships, of both a business and a personal nature. The book focuses on several intriguing duos of the nineteenth century and explores the economics of literary partnerships between author/publisher, student/mentor, husband/wife, and parent/child. These literary companions range from Emerson's promotion of Thoreau -- a relationship fraught with pitfalls and misjudgments -- to "Davis, Inc.," the seamless joining of the literary and legal minds of Rebecca Harding Davis and her husband, L. Clarke Davis. Dowling also considers and analyzes the teams of Washington Irving and his publisher, John Murray; Herman Melville and his editor, Evert Duyckinck; E. D. E. N. Southworth and Robert Bonner, the publisher who serialized her sentimental novels; Fanny Fern both with her brother/publisher, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and with Robert Bonner, the latter a more successful pairing; and the famous fraternal relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Throughout, Dowling demonstrates the intrinsic irony of authors projecting their labors of the mind as autonomous even as they relied heavily on their "literary partners" to aid them in navigating the business side of writing.

Written during the Italian winter of 1930, The Blue Spill is an unfinished detective novel written by Ezra Pound – the leading figure of modernist poetry in the 20th century – and his long-time companion Olga Rudge. Published for the first time in this authoritative critical edition, the novel reflects both Rudge's and Pound's voracious reading of popular fiction as it echoes and parodies such writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Based on the original manuscripts of the novel, this critical edition includes annotation and textual commentary throughout. The book also includes critical essays exploring the contexts of the work, from the dynamics of artistic collaboration to the growing popularity of detective fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. Taken together, this unique publication sheds new light on the relationship between the literary avant-garde and popular culture in the modernist period.

Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national identity and national citizenship elicited by 19th-century sociopolitical transformations. Together with popular commentary about language in Congressional records, periodicals, grammar books, etiquette manuals, and educational materials, literary products tell stories about how gendered discussions of language worked to deflect nationally divisive debates over Indian Removal and slavery, to stabilize mid-19th-century sociopolitical mobility, to illuminate the logic of Jim Crow, and to temper the rise of "New Women" and "New Immigrants" at the end and turn of the 19th century. Strand enhances our understandings of how ideologies of language, gender, and nation have been interarticulated in American history and culture and how American literature has been entwined in their construction, reflection, and dissemination.