Collaborative Fiction - Academic Perspectives and Projects

Academic Perspectives and Projects

From an academic perspective, there is anxiety about collaborative authorial endeavors. Academics are concerned with being able to discover who wrote what, and which ideas belong to whom. Specifically, in the humanities collaborative authorship has been frowned upon in favor of the individual author. In these instances, antiquated ideas of individual genius influence how scholars look at issues of attribution, tenure, etc. Collaboration scholars Ede and Lunsford note, "everyday practices in the humanities continue to ignore, or even to punish, collaboration while authorizing work attributed to (autonomous) individuals". In particular, literary-critical essays often move to "settle" questions of authorship before moving on to their central interpretive purposes.

Woodmansee uses studies of writing practices since the Renaissance to conclude that the modern definition of authorship, is a 'relatively recent formation' and that previously 'more corporate and collaborative' forms of writing prevailed, suggesting a long history of Collaborative Fiction. She further argues that the concept that 'genuine authorship consists in individual acts of origination' is an entirely modern myth.

For Renaissance playwrights, collaboration appears to have been the norm, Bently notes that nearly two-thirds of plays mentioned in Henslowe's papers reflect the participation of more than one writer. There is also an issue of continuous revision, it was common practice in Renaissance English theatre for professional writers attached to a company to compose new characters, scenes, prologues and epilogues for plays in which they did not originally have a hand. Scott McMillin has exported revision as a deconstruction of authorial individuality in the Sir Thomas More manuscript.

In an artistic sense, as Lorraine York notes, “Critics and readers feel a persistent need to ‘de-collaborate’ these works, to parse the collective text into the separate contributions of two or more authors”. This is part of a tradition in criticism to view collaboration as a subset or aberrant kind of individual authorship - such that later readers could separate out by examining the collaborative text. Particular examples of this approach to criticism include Cyrus Hoy who studies authorship in the Beaumont/Fletcher plays.

There have been several university-based projects that investigated collaborative fiction, both from a writing perspective and as a testbed for scientific techniques, such as visualization of narrative structure.