[1] Literary history long treated the anonymous publication of a work as a gesture of modesty or a concession to circumstance, the withholding of a name that the reader was expected quietly to supply. [2] More recent criticism has proposed that anonymity was often a positive rhetorical instrument rather than a mere absence. [3] An unsigned title page could lend a satire the appearance of disinterested truth, allow a woman's novel to be judged apart from the expectations attached to her sex, or invite a coterie of readers to guess at an authorship whose concealment was itself the entertainment. [4] On this account the missing name is not a blank to be filled but a device to be read, one that shapes how a text asks to be received. [5] The difficulty, as skeptics note, is that intention is hard to recover: the same silent title page may mask prudence, strategy, or indifference, and the modern preference for reading it as strategy may say more about present criticism than about past practice.
