From Shakespeare to Autofiction

Approaches to authorship after Barthes and Foucault

Edited by Martin Procházka

£20.00

ISBN: 9781800086555

Publication: April 01, 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.

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

Format: Paperback

Size: 234 × 156 mm

210 Pages

10 B&W photo/halftones

ISBN: 9781800086555

Publication: April 01, 2024

Series: Comparative Literature and Culture