Social Authorship and the Mediation of Memory in Anne Grant’s Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the early 1820s, Anne MacVicar Grant (1755–1838) compiled a manuscript miscellany that exemplifies Grant’s poetic activities throughout her writing life and encapsulates the conditions under which she composed and circulated verse. I identify those conditions as a form of social authorship, and the miscellany as a media object that records activities of reading, writing, and manuscript circulation closely resembling those of literary coteries. Moreover, the miscellany functioned as a memorial to the social networks that the circulation of poetry had helped to create. Each poem formed a node not only in Grant’s social circles but in her memories of those circles so that the compilation and annotation of poems mediated Grant’s memories of her social circles to those with access to the volume. Grant’s iterative inscription and reading of the miscellany thus turned commemorative poetry into a technology for the medialization and memorialization of social networks.