A Scientist in Love

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.

Exploring late Victorian (Co-)Authorship: Two Models of Popular Literary Collaboration

The lively and competitive popular literary market of the late Victorian era provided fertile ground for the development of an unprecedented number of alliances between authors. Literary collaboration triggered writers and readers alike, and in the 1880s and 1890s it became a fashionable practice of popular literature. Two writing partnerships stood out: the English friends Walter Besant and James Rice, and the Anglo-Irish cousins Edith Somerville and Violet (Martin) Ross. Apparently similar, these partnerships do indeed share some points, but they were based on completely different understandings of what literary collaboration was and how it should be handled: Besant and Rice’s alliance was based on a clear, almost mechanical division of tasks, with one partner being the literary ‘genius’ and the other working as his assistant and manager – but still to be considered an author; Somerville and Ross’s collaboration was grounded on an intertwining of their selves during the creative process thanks to a conversational method – as they called it – which they described as the mixing of primary colours to create secondary ones. Drawing on a vast range of metadiscourses by these collaborators themselves, the present study compares the two ways of collaborating and reconstructs the authors’ perspective on their own activity, shedding light on how literary collaboration was defined and understood in the late Victorian era. This will also help to understand why such a widespread practice swiftly declined and why its products have since then sunk into oblivion.

„Astra. Roman epistolar” de Dito şi Idem – un caz de istorie literară

The literary collaboration between Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz under the pseudonym “Dito und Idem” was a real accomplishment in the 19th century not only in Romania, but on the whole European continent. After a series of individual projects on translations of Romanian literature into German, Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz began their literary collaboration (1882-1889). The main aim of the literary project was to promote the Romanian literature and culture in Western and Central Europe. Therefore, the project produced two epistolary novels (Aus zwei Welten, Astra) with a real success on the book market. As a result of their attainment, only one novel was translated in Romania. The epistolary novel Astra was published in 1886 in German and translated and printed in feuilleton, in Romania, the same year. Taking everything into account, the study looks into the manner in which Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz managed to use literary methods characteristic to the feuilleton-novel (pickling technique, narrative “seduction”, sensational plot etc.) which assured a consistent distribution of the novel. Furthermore, the comparison between the feuilleton-format and book format of the novel Astra offered us a new perspective on the transition of translated novels into the pages of a feuilleton. All in all, the literary collaboration between Dito and Idem represents a whole page in the literary history of the Romanian novel.

Australian Women Writing History during the Interwar and Second World War Years

In the interwar and Second World War periods, women writers took the lead in the Australian literary scene in an unprecedented way, producing a number of significant novels, plays, and works of nonfiction that interrogated issues of colonialism, nationalism, gender relations, and Australia’s place in the world. Many of these works had period settings or were engaged in some way with Australia’s settler colonial past. While the historical writings of Australian women writers vary greatly in terms of literary style, genre, cultural value, political affiliation, and the degree to which they either contest or reify ideas of national progress, these works represent a substantial contribution to the reimagining of the nation’s past in the period from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. Furthermore, many of the fictional works of these women writers traveled beyond national borders due to the new mobilities of publication and distribution available to Australian writers at the time. Two major case studies reveal the ways in which Australian women writers contributed to the writing of Australian history in both national and international contexts in the interwar and Second World War years: M. Barnard Eldershaw, the pseudonym for the literary collaboration between Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956), and Eleanor Dark (1901–1985).

Collaborative Processes in Science and Literature: an In-Depth Look at the Cases of CERN and SIC

In this paper we examine how the process of collaboration works in science and literature. In the first part, we discuss the features of scientific collaboration and literary collaboration and the differences between them. In the second part, we analyze two processes of collaboration, each from a different field: the case of CERN and high-energy physics and the case of Scrittura Industriale Collettiva and its Great Open Novel. Lastly, we try to compare those two processes and deduce the common traits of a successful collaboration.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Besant and Collaboration

At the heart of this chapter is the assertion that it is impossible to understand the full complexity of the nineteenth-century literary tradition without acknowledging that as the result of the expansion of the marketplace and the proliferation of collaborative modes of writing, the mid-to-late nineteenth century underwent a re-evaluation of the inherited Romantic constructs of authorship. It examines Walter Besant’s role as a central figure in this re-evaluation through his extended examinations of, and experiments with, collaborative authority, and the status of the author in general. This chapter discusses Walter Besant’s treatments of the topic of literary collaboration with close reference to his public commentary in the press and in his life-writing which expose and examine cultural—and some of Besant’s own—anxieties circulating at the fin de siècle about the perceived negative and disruptive effects of reading collaboratively written works. This chapter unpacks Besant’s ‘spousal’ collaborative model and situates Besant’s attitudes to literary collaboration against its marketplace contexts generally, examining how they compare with other contemporaneous literary and journalistic commentators’ treatments of shared writing across genres.

Collaboration in Theory and Practice

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is it acknowledged? is it mutual? is it equal? and is it separable? All authors receive advice from others, making all creative practice in a sense collaborative, but this chapter proposes that texts in which the collaboration is mutually undertaken and overtly acknowledged differ fundamentally from traditionally authored texts. On the other hand, criticism of collaboration has been hampered by the assumption that true collaboration must be evenly divided (all of Stevenson’s collaborations were, in one way or another, unequal ones), and that the business of the critic is to solve the “problem” of who has written what, a project which shows an a priori scepticism about the possibility of collaboration at all.