Julianne Werlin on the Death of the Writer and Life of the Author

Julianne Werlin spends much of her scholarly life thinking about how writers understand themselves.

Specifically, how they live, what they hope for, and what it means to make art within the limits of a human lifetime. An associate professor of English at Duke, Werlin works on English Renaissance literature, focusing largely on the mid-16th to the late-17th century.

It’s a period that covers Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage, the rise of English prose fiction, the dense metaphysical poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, and ultimately Milton and the shifting literary world of the Restoration.

Werlin’s current book project, English Renaissance Authors: A Demographic History, examines the lives of roughly 600 writers from this period. Each chapter analyzes a different part of their education, class background, marriage, maternity, and in the chapter she discussed at the recurring speaker series tgiFHI, death.

“I’m trying to figure out the actual patterns that shape these authors’ lives,” she said. But those patterns are not just historical details. They also reveal how Renaissance writers understood authorship itself.

The chapter on death explores a striking tradition: the idea, revived from classical antiquity, that literature, especially poetry, could secure immortality. Werlin pointed out that Renaissance writers inherited this from Greek and Roman authors like Horace and Virgil, who imagined their names enduring as long as human beings exist.

That aspiration faded during the Middle Ages, when Christian ideas about salvation reshaped cultural priorities. But with the Renaissance and the expansion of print, the dream of literary immortality quickly returned.

Werlin is most interested in how these ideals interacted with the realities of historical mortality. At the turn of the 17th century, wealthy Europeans began to live longer, introducing a slow demographic change that reshaped expectations.

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Young writers in earlier centuries, aware that death could come suddenly, often wrote with an urgent desire for their work to outlive them. “Contemporary writers, accustomed to longer lifespans, tended to focus on fame in the present,” Werlin said.

“You’re not thinking so much ‘if I die tomorrow, what happens’?”

Her project is notably sociological in scope. She examines how authors made money, how they moved through social classes, and how they responded to the pressures of their time.

Werlin has acknowledged that some readers worry that this approach may “demystify” literature by emphasizing the practical motivations behind it. But for her, this focus is precisely the point.

“Literature starts from those motivations,” she said. “But because it is a project of meaning-making, it gives all of us a language for thinking about their experiences.”

In her view, literature does more than seek fame or express personal fears. It transforms basic human yearnings, like ambition and desire for recognition, into shared frameworks for thinking.

“We all feel these things, but literature makes it meaningful,” Werlin said. These commitments shape her understanding of the humanities more broadly. 

Werlin said she has become increasingly concerned not only about the erosion of critical thought in an age of AI, but also about the dwindling sense of shared cultural knowledge.

“I try to emphasize having specific and personal knowledge of particular objects, not just instant access to information,” Werlin explained. Literature, in her view, endures because we live with it through stories, poems, and texts, which also become internal reference points through which we understand ourselves and others.

The past and present, as well the individual lives and longer histories that extend into communities, is a continuity that runs through much of Werlin's work. Her current project grew out of her longstanding interest in how large historical forces shape culture, and how individuals respond to them.

After completing her first book on the early modern book trade, she found herself wanting to focus more directly on people. From their choices and constraints, to hopes and fears that informed their lived experiences.

“What I believe in is not actually the book trade, it’s human beings,” she shared.

Werlin’s next book will explore how literature creates connections across time, and how readers place themselves within long historical arcs and generations. For her, this is really at the heart of the humanities.

“We pass through time, we age, we change, and we try to express this in books,” she said. “Literature becomes meaningful when it helps us make sense of that shared human journey.”