Attributing Authorship: An Introduction

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2002 M06 20 - 271 pages
Recent literary scholarship has seen a shift of interest away from questions of attribution. Yet these questions remain urgent and important for any historical study of writing, and have been given a powerful new impetus by advances in statistical studies of language and the coming on line of large databases of texts in machine-searchable form. The present book is the first comprehensive survey of the field from a literary perspective to appear for forty years. It covers both traditional and computer based approaches to attribution, and evaluates each in respect of their potentialities and limitations. It revisits a number of famous controversies, including those concerning the authorship of the Homeric poems, books from the Old and New Testaments, and the plays of Shakespeare. Written with wit as well as erudition Attributing Authorship will make this intriguing field accessible for students and scholars alike.

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Contents

Individuality and sameness
4
Historical survey
14
Defining authorship
32
External evidence
51
Internal evidence
79
Stylistic evidence
98
Gender and authorship
119
Craft and science
132
Bibliographical evidence
163
Forgery and attribution
179
Shakespeare and Co
194
Arguing attribution
209
Notes
228
Select bibliography
253
Index
265

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About the author (2002)

Harold Love is Professor of English at Monash University. He has written extensively on early modern English literature and the history of the performing arts in Australia.

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