| This dissertation combines composition studies and literary studies in order to examine conventional concepts of authorship, and to argue that literary writers frequently collaborate. Cases of collaborative literary compositions provide the basis for the analysis and the argument.;A brief history of authorship traces the contradictions which arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the Romantic myth of individual, independent authors and the actual practices of professional writers within a commercial system of production. The concept of the isolated artist continues to pervade concepts of literary authorship, and influences the ways in which literary texts are studied as products of a single individual. I argue that "authorship" is frequently a collaborative enterprise, but that collaboration is seldom recognized because it contradicts the ideology of the isolated Romantic artist. Composition theory and research, because it studies the actual composing practices of writers, offers an alternative apparatus for studying literary-writing as a social and interactive process.;Case studies of novelists illustrate the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary writers collaborate in the drafting, revising, and publication of their texts. The cases include the master-apprentice collaborations of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; the editor-author collaborations of Maxwell Perkins with Thomas Wolfe, Marcia Davenport, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; and peer collaborations such as Frankenstein, The Gilded Age, and Love Medicine. Composition theory introduces the advantages and implications of these various types of joint authorship; Kenneth Bruffee and John Trimbur, for example, both raise issues of collaborative learning, while Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford discuss rhetorical and contextual factors that facilitate (or impede) collaboration. Literary studies about textual conventions also bear on collaboration: they imply that conventions often mediate conflicts among collaborators, and that they provide guides for both conformity and variation.;Cases of collaborative literary writing not only bring together composition and literary studies; they also introduce alternative models of authorship, in which writers share responsibility for a text, and negotiate roles, differences, and authority. |
