Readers, literary critics, and theorists alike have long demonstrated an abiding fascination with the author, both as a real person—an artist and creator—and as a theoretical concept that shapes the way we read literary works. Whether anonymous, pseudonymous, or trending on social media, authors continue to be an object of critical and readerly interest. Yet theories surrounding authorship have yet to be satisfactorily updated to register the changes wrought on the literary sphere by the advent of the digital age, the recent turn to autofiction, and the current literary climate more generally. In Reading the Contemporary Author the contributors look back on the long history of theorizing the author and offer innovative new approaches for understanding this elusive figure.
Mapping the contours of the vast territory that is contemporary authorship, this collection investigates authorship in the context of narrative genres ranging from memoir and autobiographically informed texts to biofiction and novels featuring novelist narrators and characters. Bringing together the perspectives of leading scholars in narratology, cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, comparative literature, and autobiography studies, Reading the Contemporary Author demonstrates that a variety of interdisciplinary viewpoints and critical stances are necessary to capture the multifaceted nature of contemporary authorship.

lgrsnf/Reading the Contemporary Author - Edited by Alison Gibbons & Elizabeth King.pdf

Wiley & Sons, Limited, John

United States, United States of America

PT, 2023

Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. The Author on the World Stage
1. The Public Intellectual on Stage
2. The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of Gender
3. The Permissible Author
Part 2. The Author in the Mirror
4. Authorship and Autobiography
5. A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Autobiographical Elegy
6. The Author as a Work of Art
7. Radical Realism and Fictionality Modes in Contemporary Auto/Biographical Literature
Part 3. The Author on the Page
8. Reconstructing the Author through Biofiction’s Anchored Imagination
9. The Anxiety of Authorship
10. Dead Authors Tell No Tales
Coda
Beyond the “Implied Author,” from Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology
Contributors
Index
Series List

2024-01-06