The Author’s Hand. A Literary History of Handwriting

We are living in an age when accelerating technological development seems to render handwriting and penmanship superfluous or obsolete. Handwriting, however, has had a deep historical impact that the advent of digital media allows us to analyze anew. The purpose of this project is to explore the literary history of writing by hand from a media historical perspective.

The role of handwriting is more than a mere direct channel between author and book, more than only an ornamental or social function.

An additional point of departure for this project is that handwriting is a medium that, in line with the logic of digital media of today, has inherent regulatory mechanisms that produce its output as well as its users.

The project consists of six case studies, where self-reflective literary texts are analyzed from the point of view of the material conditions that shaped them.

From Horace to Melville, from Erasmus to Strindberg, writing by hand is associated with separate “discourse networks,” where historically different technical, technological and institutional conditions affect how the hand that holds the pen moves across the paper.

The inquiry, the first of its kind, will thus be able to highlight how writing by hand has shaped its writers as well as their output in a way that has not yet been explored by researchers.