Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals

Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals by Manushag N. Powell embraces periodicals across the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century to argue that this mode of writing, packed with humor and verve, originates the figure of the mass-market author as a literary character. Powell posits that, at the same time, periodicals harbor inescapable doubts as to whether such a character, and by extension their own genre, is sustainable in the long term.