Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

Bringing the collaborative process to life through an array of examples, Heather Witcher shows that sympathetic co-creation is far more than the mere act of writing together. While foregrounding the material aspects of collaboration – hands uniting on the page, blank space left for fellow contributors, the writing and exchanging of drafts – this study also illuminates its social aspects and its reliance on Victorian liberalism: dialogue, the circulation of correspondence, the lived experience of collaboration, and, on a less material plane, transhistorical collaborations with figures of the past. Witcher takes a broad approach to these partnerships and, in doing so, challenges traditional expectations surrounding the nature of authorship itself, not least its typical classification as a solitary activity. Within this new framework, collaboration enables the titles of 'coauthor,' 'influencer,' 'editor,' 'critic,' and 'inspiration' to coexist. This book celebrates the plurality of collaboration and underscores the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing.

• Includes interdisciplinary perspectives, from literature to philosophy, showing how different disciplines can interact to inform our understanding of nineteenth-century writing and authorship
• Guides readers through an innovative new theory of collaboration in an accessible and engaging way, using individualized case studies of author partnerships to explore the collaborative process
• Introduces the process of collaborative writing using archival methods and examples of unpublished manuscripts, challenging the idea of a 'finished' or 'finalized' work and illuminating the writing practice for a wide readership