Abstract
This chapter analyses the way drama and fiction contribute to the definition of the author as an autonomous agent in the context of the emerging print market. Both plays and novels of the period register the author’s dependence upon other agents of the field of literary production, on the technologies of literary creation and the authors’ attempts of emancipation. William Congreve’s Love For Love (1695), Alexander Pope’s Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and Richard Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) show that in the theatrical context authors were bound to cede their authority to other creators of performance and dreamt of a release from the state of dependence by print. The eighteenth-century novels, however, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in particular, show that the creation in the context of print marketplace require the negotiations of creative autonomy with readers and critics.
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Maciulewicz, J. (2018). The Authors’ Search for Creative Autonomy. In: Representations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative Writing. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92609-4_5
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