This essay explores the best-selling American author Edith Wharton’s status as a bibliophile and book collector. It draws comparisons between her tastes as a collector and those of some of her neighbors, especially those residing in the Berkshires area of western Massachusetts around 1900. It focuses, in particular, on a rare, first-edition copy of the play Esther (1689), by Jean Racine; Wharton owned a copy of this book and so did her neighbors, the Choate family. As such, the essay launches an investigation into the value that Racine held as an author for members of Wharton’s milieu in fin-de-siècle America, exposing a set of class-specific beliefs that appear to counter the progressivist and democratic ideologies of that era. It reads Wharton’s and her associates’ interests in Racine as indicative of class-specific ideas regarding cultural inheritance. It argues that Wharton and the Choates, in collecting rare editions of Racine, were doing more than paying homage to literary tradition or enhancing their cultural capital; they were mounting tacit claims for their particular positions within a given social order, inspired in part by romantic visions of pre-revolutionary France.

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.

This article examines the publishing conditions and reception history of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s satirical novel Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908). It contends that Duncan’s understanding of her reading audiences, and the gendered expectations of a woman writing in the early twentieth century, allowed her to advance the novel genre in an English imperial literary market. Cousin Cinderella foregrounds the circulation of people and printed material and is interested in their reading and interpretation through the networked connections that empire engenders. Indeed, Duncan’s global mobility and her perspective on Canada as a rejuvenating racial and economic presence in an enlarged world led her to the type of generic experimentation discerned in Cousin Cinderella and to a lesser extent The Imperialist of 1904. In Cousin Cinderella, Duncan extends both novelistic romance and realism through the trope of female authorship and the novel’s allegorised character Mary Trent. Through Mary, Duncan features women in race-making and nation-making projects, where sentimental marriage functions allegorically for practical political and economic ends. And like Mary, Duncan considered herself attached to Canada, as she established success in a market dominated by male authors and metropolitan markets. This article on an understudied novel in Duncan’s oeuvre brings together a study of authorship, literary analysis, and cultural history to contextualise and elucidate Duncan’s path-breaking career.

A review of Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor's (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

A review of Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor's (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Cambridge University Press, 2019.