Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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Everywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literaturebefore the Romantic creation of the "author"and what this means for literary criticism. Drawing on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, it reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.

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"Literary critics, asked to summarize their research, are often asked, Who are your authors Everywhere and Nowhere cleverly baffles this question and turns our attention to anonymity. Bracketing out the author, Mark Vareschi brings into sight other features of publication: namely, networks of writing and reception and a complex of print and performance. He works impressively with bibliographic records, booksellers catalogs, advertisements, and paratextual material, like tables of contents. His careful bibliometric work establishes changing percentages of anonymous publication across decades and genres. This is fresh, compelling, detail-rich scholarship and essential reading."Brad Pasanek, author of Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary

"Everywhere and Nowhere is that rare thing: a genuinely interdisciplinary study, capacious and illuminating, of how anonymous authorship impacts meaning across genres and media. In Mark Vareschis hands, anonymity is transformed into a lens for reexamining the most fundamental literary concepts (authorship and intention, medium, textuality) and renovating themnot just in the domain of print, but across the rich media ecologies of the eighteenth century."Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania

"Vareschis intelligent and well-argued book opens up intriguing questions about the relationships between authors, texts, and readers, and he makes excellent use of bibliometric data to support his claims. It serves as a valuable reminder that eighteenth-century conceptions of authorship were often very different from our own and provides a wealth of data that should help to recontextualize the decisions of so many canonical eighteenth-century authors to publish at least some of their works anonymously."Journal of British Studies

"This revelatory study provides a new interdisciplinary examination of the notion of anonymity in the eighteenth century."Modern Language Notes

"Even as it defines anonymous and attributed works as part of a shared discourse, criticism often cordons them off from one another by making anonymous works serve as examples of a discourse that then warrants a more extensive reading in the attributed text. By drawing attention to the literary networks in which anonymous publication was enmeshed, Everywhere and Nowhere convincingly illustrates how much we miss about the eighteenth century when we treat anonymous works as second-class citizens."Eighteenth Century Fiction

"Vareschis book employs a variety of tools and disciplines to consider how authorial anonymity sheds light on processes of mediation in the long eighteenth century."The BARS Review

Author Bio

Mark Vareschi is assistant professor of English at the University of WisconsinMadison.