This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.

The introduction provides an outline of the book and summarizes its main ideas and theses. In addition, it briefly discusses methodology in the history of philosophy and Kierkegaard’s controversial use of pseudonyms.

This chapter examines the rhetoric, temporality, and interactivity of relationships between writers, readers, editors, and publishers of literary magazines and miscellanies, genres that were among the most important print media of the 1820s. Forms and styles of magazine writing became increasingly performative and improvisational as authors adapted to the demands of a periodical rhythm. Especially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, this performative quality involves the construction of pseudonymous personae and theatricalized scenes that dramatize the process of producing the magazine and parody the notion of personal identity. Two lesser-known publications extend the impact and implications of this style of journalism: Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1823–4), a Blackwood’s imitator edited by influential publisher Charles Knight, and John Galt’s The Bachelor’s Wife (1824), a miscellany that stages the processes of editing and reading within a gendered domestic setting.

Borges’s writing partnership with Bioy Casares was long-lasting and fruitful, producing a unique narrative voice and several pseudo–authors. Two of these are Bustos Domecq and Isidro Parodi –specialists in crime detection and detective fiction. Bioy and Borges collaborated as editors and compilers – of anthologies, prologues, glosses, and translations. Their attacks on nationalist and populist politics were especially virulent in the period 1942-1947, with General Perón the main target. ’La fuerza del monstruo’ (1947) is a powerful condemnation of the abuse of power and could not be published until his removal from power in 1955. A key feature of ’La fiesta...’ is its linguistic texture, constructing a carnival atmosphere.