Reading the Contemporary Author

Narrative, Authority, Fictionality

Alison Gibbons, Elizabeth King

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781496234612
• eBook ISBN: 9781496238146
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. The Public Intellectual on Stage
• 2. The Pseudonymic Author and Elena Ferrante’s Evasions of Gender
• 3. The Permissible Author
• Part 2
• 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
• 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
• List of Contributors
• Index
• About Alison Gibbons
• About Elizabeth King
• Series List