期刊名称：Aphra Behn Online : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830
电子版ISSN：2157-7129
出版年度：2016
卷号：6
期号：1
页码：1
出版社：Aphra Behn Society
摘要：This essay examines one of the central preoccupations of Mary Robinson’s authorial career, a concern with the poor financial treatment of authors. Writers, Robinson suggests, are demeaned by predatory publishers, heartless or anti-intellectual aristocratic patrons, and a disinterested, distractible reading public, none of whom care to compensate the author for the labors of her pen. In a culture that neither recognizes nor rewards female intellect, women authors are particularly vulnerable, but Robinson’s criticisms transcend the problems caused by gender alone; male authors, too, could fall into penury when their labor was insufficiently valued. Rejecting the Romantic ethos of the solitary genius dying for his art, Robinson calls for a reassessment of authorship’s value, not only as a social and cultural good, but as a valid form of work; she insists that mental labor is labor in the economic sense of the term, and that it deserves compensation with a living wage. Her writings are thus marked by a keen sense of disgust at a culture that neither recognizes economic value in literary creation, nor feels obligated to remunerate the artist for her creations.
关键词：Mary Robinson; authorship; economics; Thomas Chatterton
