Description
Book SynopsisReaders, 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 autobiograp
Trade Review“A brilliant exploration of new manifestations of authorship in the twenty-first century. Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King provide a powerful through line that reveals transformations in how we approach the subjectivity and intent of the author amid the digital revolution, the relation to identity politics, complex interactions of fact and fiction, and the role of authorial reflexivity as a process of epistemological and self-examination that extends beyond metafictional play. Through an original outside-in structure,
Reading the Contemporary Author is a compelling narratological inquiry into how changing concepts of the author have played a central, mediating role in how we read and interpret the increasingly uncertain thresholds of texts and contemporary life.”—Virginia Newhall Rademacher, author of
Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative“The articles in this valuable work provide a foray into the multifarious nature of contemporary authorship, demonstrating that, although our conception of authorship has taken many forms and will take many more, the author always remains a pivotal, often controversial, site of analysis.”—Marjorie Worthington, author of
The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction“An important contribution to the knowledge of contemporary authorship but also to contemporary narrativity and contemporary narrative genres, including biofiction, autofiction, memoir, novels featuring novelist narrators, and more.”—Sylvie Patron, author of
The Narrator: A Problem in Narrative TheoryTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgements Introduction: Authorship in Literary Criticism and Narrative Theory
Elizabeth King and Alison Gibbons PART I: THE AUTHOR ON THE WORLD STAGE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
1. The Public Intellectual on Stage: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Odile Heynders 2. The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of Gender
Jaclyn Partyka 3
. The Permissible Author: Cultural Politics and the Market Economy of the Literary Sphere
Christopher González PART II: THE AUTHOR IN THE MIRROR: AUTO-AUTHORSHIP, MEMOIR, AND THE NARRATING ‘I’
4. Authorship and Autobiography
Arnaud Schmitt 5. “I wanted to be present to hear her last words”: A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Autobiographical Elegy
Alison Gibbons 6. The Author as a Work of Art: Graphic Memoir, Style, and Authorial Agents
Nancy Pedri 7. Radical Realism and Modes of Fictionality in Contemporary Auto/Biographical Literature
Fiona Doloughan PART III: THE AUTHOR ON THE PAGE: REPRESENTATIONS OF AUTHORSHIP IN FICTION
8. Reconstructing the Author through Biofiction’s Anchored Imagination
Michael Lackey and Laura Cernat 9. The Anxiety of Authorship: Novelists as Narrators
Paul Dawson 10. Dead Authors Tell No Tales: The Ailing Author-Character in Contemporary Novels about Novelists
Elizabeth King CODA
11. The Author beyond ‘the implied author’: From Postclassical to Postcritical Narratology
Stefan Kjerkegaard ContributorsIndex
