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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
First Advisor
Lisa Maruca
Abstract
This dissertation investigates publications that were printed or published by British women to generate income for charitable causes such as jails, hospitals, and distressed families in the long eighteenth century. I introduce the concept of the “benevolent publication” to describe these understudied publications, which are often, but with important exceptions, published provincially in small print runs. Specifically, this project is interested in material benefit, that is, instances where the profits—all or part—generated from the sale of benevolent publications are diverted out of the print trade and to the charitable object. Although the women authors and editors of these publications include those who are relatively unknown, I argue that they were professionals possessed of the skills and strategies necessary for publishing these texts.
To account for the authorial labor that exceeds the composition of these texts, I introduce the term “author-facilitated publication” to describe the broad variety of ways benevolent authors and editors were involved in the publication of their texts, including the negotiations with agents of the publishing process, the marketing and sale of these texts, and moving their profits to charities. I also recover the lasting role these publications play in literary and cultural history.
This project sits at the intersection of book history and literary history and uses feminist bibliographical methods to reinvestigate the material texts of benevolent publications to tell new stories about the roles these texts played, presenting this evidence in spreadsheets and tables, gathered through extensive archival research. This dissertation demonstrates that benevolent publications congeal as a recognizable genre within the eighteenth century with their own discourse in the literary reviews and cultural strictures regarding benevolence. This project shows through several examples that an anonymous text’s benevolent intent can offer opportunities for authorial attribution, encouraging us to revisit long held assumptions. More broadly, this dissertation uses the “hustle” of publishing benevolent publications to expand our understanding of authorial involvement in the publication of texts of all kinds during the eighteenth century.
Recommended Citation
Spunaugle, Emily, ""printed For The Benefit": British Women's Benevolent Publications In The Long Eighteenth Century" (2024). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4144.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4144