The Politics of Collaboration

Abstract

Given the increasing attention paid in recent years to the subject of literary collaboration, it is odd that so little notice has been taken of the history of the word. For even a brief glance at the OED undercuts surprisingly persistent ideologies of Romantic authorship. Far from disappearing with the rise of the so-called regime of the author as “solitary genius” in the late eighteenth century, as historians of authorship still too frequently assume,¹ collaboration actually entered the English vocabulary in the Romantic period. As my epigraphs indicate, the word was first imported from France by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1801 to describe the cooperation between rich and poor, and then anglicized a year later by Jeremy Bentham to talk about the cooperation between the French and English. According to the OED definitions, both men must be counted as collaborators, Bentham as part of the long-term exchange between French and English Enlightenment thought that laid the groundwork for Romanticism, and Robinson as one of the tireless band of chroniclers, cataloguers, and confessors who together produced Romanticism as a “spirit of the age.”

Collaborator 1. One who works in conjunction with another or others; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work.

1802 BENTHAM Wks. X. 395 He was a collaborator of Mirabeau’s.

2. spec. One who collaborates with the enemy.

1943 New Statesman 25 Sept. 197 Infiltration would be easy with the help of such well-placed collaborators. 1946 “G. ORWELL” Critical Ess. 137 At this moment, with France newly liberated and the witchhunt for collaborators in full swing.

Collaborateur. = COLLABORATOR 1.

1801 H. C. ROBINSON Diary (1869) I. v. 107 A body of poor students called collaborateurs… who assist the more wealthy but less advanced.

(OED)