Comparative Literature and Culture: From Shakespeare to Autofiction : Approaches to Authorship after Barthes and Foucault (Hardcover)

A critical examination of authorship that traces its historical evolution and asserts its significance from early to late modernity.

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 autobiographical and biographical fiction. In response to Roland Barthes’s “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 offers a critical reassessment of recent debates on authorship in European and Latin American literature. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflections, ones that take into account the historical development of authorship and shifting understandings of fiction, performativity, and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autobiographical fiction), and discuss the methodologies that reinstate the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of the literary process. It is essential reading for scholars and enthusiasts of literature seeking a deeper understanding of how authorship has evolved and continues to shape literary landscapes.