From Shakespeare to Autofiction

Approaches to authorship after Barthes and Foucault

Edited by Martin Procházka

£20.00

ISBN: 9781800086555

Publication: April 23, 2024

Series: Comparative Literature and Culture

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From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as ‘cultural capital’, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autofiction and biofiction. In response to Roland Barthes’ ‘removal of the Author’ and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as ‘multiplicities’ integrated by agency, performativity and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

The book also reassesses recent debates of authorship in European and Latin American literatures. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflection that takes into account the historical development of authorship and changing understandings of fiction, performativity and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from the early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autofiction), and discuss the methodologies reinstating the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of literary process.

Praise for From Shakespeare to Autofiction

'In this collection a multicultural group of literary scholars analyse a rich array of authorship types and models across four centuries. After decades of liquid poststructuralist concepts, it is refreshing and inspiring to think through such diversity of authorship strategies – from oral culture, through sociological constructs, to self-referential and autobiographical ontological games that writers play with us, their readers.'

Pavel Drábek, University of Hull

Martin Procházka is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at Charles University, Prague.

List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: authors that matter
Martin Procházka
1 The rise of Shakespearean cultural capital: early configurations and appropriations of Shakespeare
Jean-Christophe Mayer
2 Religious conflict and the return of the author in early modern dramatic paratexts
Jeanne Mathieu
3 ‘Many more remains of ancient genius’: approaches to authorship in the Ossian Controversy
Petra Johana Poncarová
4 Translation of indigenous oral narratives and the concept of collaborative authorship
Johanna Fernández Castro
5 In the name of the father: Darwin, scientific authority and literary assimilation
Niall Sreenan
6 Dead Shelley
Mathelinda Nabugodi
7 The author as agent in the field: (post-)Bourdieusian approaches to the author
Josef Šebek
8 Autofiction as (self-)criticism: suggestions from recent Brazilian literature
Sonia Miceli
9 Latin American autofiction authors as transformers: beyond textuality in Aira and Bellatin
Gerardo Cruz-Grunerth
10 The scene of invention: author at work in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg
Laura Cernat