Jack Stillinger

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered the work of a single author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, to demonstrate that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon.

Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius

Deidre Shauna Lynch

The most-trusted literature anthology of all time, now in its 50th year.

The Romantic Period

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

Meyer Howard Abrams

Discusses English romanticism, concentrating on the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge

Essays on English Romanticism

The Correspondent Breeze

John Keats

Center for Advanced Study Professor of English Jack Stillinger, PH D

Jack Stillinger's concern is with the words of Keats's texts: "I wish," he says, "to get rid of the wrong ones and to suggest how to go about constructing texts with a greater proportion of the right ones." He finds that in the two best modern editions of Keats, one third of the texts have one or more wrong words. Modern editors have sometimes based their texts on inferior holograph, transcript, or printed versions; sometimes combined readings from separate versions; sometimes retained words added by copyists and early editors (who frequently made "improvements" when they thought the poems needed them); and sometimes, of course, introduced independent errors of their own. The heart of this book is a systematic account of the textual history of each of the 150 poems that can reasonably be assigned to Keats. In each history Stillinger dates the work, as closely as it can be dated; gives the details of first publication; specifies the existing variant readings and their sources; and suggests what might be the basis for a standard text.

The Texts of Keats's Poems

The Hoodwinking of Madeline, and Other Essays on Keats's Poems

Using the 180-year history of Keats'sEve of St. Agnes as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book explores the nature and whereabouts of "meaning" in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy that includes the endlessly multifarious reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger also considers the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.

Jack Stillinger

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