A New Perspective on the Minerva Press's “Derivative” Novels: Authorizing Borrowed Material

Abstract

The Minerva Press is being written back into Romantic-era literary history, both for its impact on the novel market and for the “Romantic” tropes (e.g. genius, transcendence) that its unprecedented output of novels – many by new women authors – inspired. The novels themselves, which are usually dismissed as derivative, hover at the margins of literary history. This dismissal obscures the fact that Minerva novels were published prior to modern divisions between high and low literature. A discussion of four Minerva novels suggests that novelists drew on Romantic projections of poetic genius as well as anxieties about profligate print culture to develop their own model of collective authorship. Marginalized novelists connected with each other over space and time via the circulating-library novel. Popular tropes and fashionable terms also provided marginalized authors with the language to contribute to pressing conversations – most importantly, Romantic reassessments of authorship and literature. Novelists’ contributions are not entirely one-sided. It will be suggested that Minerva's “generic” model of authorship reverberates in Romantic poetics – and in particular, in Percy Shelley's portrayal of how the poet comes to compose.