Wanting a name

Although authors frequently employed anonymity to conceal their identity, Wanting a Name contends that many well-known eighteenth-century authors redesigned anonymity as an open secret to reveal how readers equated the authorial name too closely with a fixed identity. Milton, Defoe, Johnson, and Sterne embraced anonymity in ways as curious as hand-delivering unsigned texts, or presenting Anonymous as a legal surname, to provoke the reader into measuring the ever-changing distance between authorial persona and biography. The analysis of unsigned texts within their biographical and historical contexts demonstrates that anonymity variously indicated a collective voice representing views the authors themselves held, or it ventriloquized others, or it satirized opponents in stances that readers could perceive because the authors' anonymity played out paradoxically against their fame. By representing many possible authorial subjects, anonymity offers another genealogy for the fictive beside the familiar narrative of the emergent novel, where readers identified with characters and situations. Just as novelistic fiction could refer to actual events without "lying" or "telling the truth," even as those terms remained key to how fiction and anonymous authorship were defined and articulated, anonymity prompted readers to identify authorship as a fictive construction that nonetheless related to a real person. By challenging the indexical function of the authorial name across a wide range of prose genres, this referentiality gives readers who consider the way that the counterfactual works a substantially different and more complete itinerary. By studying how anonymity participates in discussions of veracity and mendacity both in fictional genres such as the novel, and in non-fictional genres such as political pamphlets, periodical essays, sermons, and letters, Wanting a Name supplements theories that define the "literary" as that which is signed, that which deserves to be signed, and that which is assigned, consequently, an author-function.