Collaboration and Early Modern Women Writers

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Collaboration las emanged as a demanant topic is early modern staches over the last tharty years, the paradigm of collaboration has helped to fuel a feminist revisionist literacy history that is alect to the vanety of rales women anal zen played meatly umodern hterary productum. My thess conmbutes to this project. I investigate the textual legacies of four sites of women's manuscript production in early modem England. Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's Poems Songs a Pastorall and a Plics, the Story Books produced by the Fettar and Collet families at Lattle Gadlung. Jane Lounley and Mary Howard's translations, dedicated to their father, the Eard of Arundel and Mary Wroth's two mamscript versions of Love's Victory. All of these sexts are presentation volumes of manuscrip pubseations, and as such they commumicate as nach theough their material construction and visual. omamentation as they do through their written meanings. Questions of production, then, must reach beyond the author(s), nazrowly defined, to include their processes of matenal construction. As plays dialogues, ocations and dedicatory epistles, fathermore, all four case studiers heat a close relationship to performance, and therefore to oral and social histories. Cracking open the concept of authorship in this way admits a range of textual collaborators alongside writers. These collaborators contribute in teeluncal and hierary, enmotional and economa, maternal and maginative, obvious and Indden ways. llow do these texts represeur their own complex processes of collaborative production? What kinds of collaborations do they foregroueal and why? And what do these collaborationus iell us about Our operation of gender in the micro history of the text? in order to aarmer these questious, I pilot a new kamd of lustonensed toading practise that colmes the macro-lustonscol and maternalist perspectives of book history with a close textual focus. I argue that early modern women i manuscript production was mitiply collaborative, that representations of collaboration are almost always discursive and strategic, even as they are also sluped by stylistic conventiones, and that questions of proximery, status and labour inhere in cepresentations of collaboration.