Conclusion

Summary

Sympathy, fellow-feeling, enables nineteenth-century collaboration. Throughout Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century, my conception of sympathetic collaboration relies not only on the “joint creation,” but also on the associations and networks that make up the artistic process in order to trace the coming together of individuals both interpersonally and intertextually. Sympathetic collaboration is an exploratory, liberal, and necessarily social interaction and, in the nineteenth century, aesthetic, moral, and social judgments are interrelated. Sympathetic collaboration reconsiders the collective nature of nineteenth-century literary production and its reliance upon lived experience and communal relations as a means of constructing shared expression through formal experimentation. Demonstrating the extent to which Smithean sympathy influenced the Victorian establishment of liberal community, my model of collaboration illuminates an innovative argument about the nineteenth century: namely, that sympathetic communities are implicated in formal experimentation.