Anonymous Author
An anonymous author is a writer who chooses not to reveal their identity when publishing their work. This can be for various reasons, such as personal privacy, political or social concerns, or to create a sense of mystery around the writing. Many famous literary works have been attributed to anonymous authors, adding to their intrigue and historical significance.
4 Key excerpts on "Anonymous Author"
eBook - ePubVolume 15, Tome I: Kierkegaard's Concepts
Absolute to Church
- Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Anonymity Joseph Westfall Anonymity (Anonymitet —noun; Navnloshed —noun; Anonym —noun; anonym— adjective) The lexical meaning of the Danish word (from the Latin anonymus, following the Greek ἀνώνυμος) is the quality of lacking or refraining from using a name with regard to one’s public activities, perhaps especially as they may relate to the creation of literary or otherwise artistic works. 1 An anonym (literally, “without a name”) is a designation or mark, sometimes alphabetic or alphanumeric, used to conceal the name of the author of a written work without substituting a pseudonym for the author’s real name. In addition to being marked with an anonym, an anonymous work can (and often does) simply lack any ascription of authorship, or the author can be straightforwardly designated as “Anonymous.” As in the case of pseudonymity, Anonymous Authorship may originate in an intention to conceal, but with regard to historical texts it is often instead the consequence of a loss of knowledge of the author’s name with the passage of time. Although Kierkegaard employs anonymity on occasion, in the Kierkegaardian corpus anonymity is most frequently discussed in the context of other Anonymous Authors. Most of the relevant references appear in A Literary Review of Two Ages; some others appear in newspaper articles from 1836 and in The Point of View for My Work as an Author. In Kierkegaard’s understanding of the concept, anonymity consists of three essentially related notions: (1) the socio-political phenomenon of individual anonymity in public or popular movements; (2) the literary phenomenon of authoring newspaper articles and books without appending one’s name—or any name—as author; and (3) the ethical-existential phenomenon of actions lacking any genuine connection to the lives of the persons who perform them...
eBook - ePubPoems without Poets
Approaches to anonymous ancient poetry
- Boris Kayachev(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge Philological Society(Publisher)
...INTRODUCTION Boris Kayachev Every ancient poem had an author (either individual or collective), and we either know, or do not know, their name and identity; when we do not know who wrote a particular poem, it can be described as anonymous. This is the sense in which the word anonymous is used in the volume’s title, and it is important to stress that it refers, in the first place, not to an intrinsic feature of a text, but to the state of our knowledge about it. Our (lack of) knowledge can of course have degrees: for instance, when we do not know for certain, sometimes we may still be able to make a more or less informed guess about the identity of a poem’s author. Or we may actually know the author’s name but nothing else, in which case the poem may not be technically ‘nameless’, but will still be all but anonymous for most practical purposes. 1 When we do not know who was a poem’s author, our lack of knowledge can have two causes: either the author intended to remain unknown, or was forgotten in consequence of some external circumstances. 2 It could be argued that the two kinds of anonymity (which may be labelled ‘intentional’ and ‘accidental’, or ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’) are essentially different, but there are reasons for looking at both categories of texts together. On the one hand, as a rule we cannot be certain from the outset, or even at all, whether a poem is anonymous intentionally or by accident. 3 On the other, both categories of anonymous poems can share the same concomitant circumstances. These, in turn, are of two kinds. First, the lack of a known author severs the vital link to the poem’s historical context: most crucially, when the author’s identity is unknown, we have less certainty about the poem’s period and circumstances of production, and it is all but impossible to relate it to any other works by the same author (even if we know them)...
eBook - ePubVolume 15, Tome V: Kierkegaard's Concepts
Objectivity to Sacrifice
- Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald, Jon Stewart(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Pseudonymity Joseph Westfall Pseudonymity (Pseudonymitet —noun; Pseudonym —noun; pseudonym —adjective) From the Latin pseudonymus, following the Greek ψευδώνυμος. In its ordinary sense, a pseudonym (literally, “false name”) is a name other than an author’s own which the author uses with reference to a written text for the purpose of the ascription of authorship; a pseudonym is sometimes called a “pen name.” 1 In any case, pseudonymity is one means by which an individual can write and publish a written work without appending his or her own name as author. Customarily, the implication of pseudonymous authorship is that the person actually responsible for authoring the work wishes to avoid immediate association in the minds of the readers or the public between himself or herself and the work in question. There are any number of possible motivations for pseudonymous authorship, however. Kierkegaard is himself one of European literature’s most noted practitioners of pseudonymity, with over a dozen works ascribed to pseudonyms, but his discussions of the concept and practice of pseudonymity are concentrated in a single text: “A First and Last Explanation,” ascribed to Kierkegaard himself but published as an appendix to the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments...
eBook - ePub- Andrew Bennett(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...From another perspective, though, such anonymizing and pseudonymizing gestures may in fact be seen as concentrating attention on authors, on authorial-ism, precisely by provoking an interest in the true originator of the text. They may indeed be said to express what Susan Stewart calls a ‘crisis in authenticity’ (Stewart 1991: 5). Either way, the new authorial and literary regime that emerged in the eighteenth century involved a logic and economics that foregrounded authorship, increasingly insisting on the publication of the person of the author, the originator and owner of the work; and it also increasingly disavowed both an aristocratic ideology that presented the author as a gentleman scornful of print, and the mercenary, mercantile arrangements of print publication. It is this formulation of authorship that will be fully expressed in the Romantic period and that will become the conception of authorship that will be accepted and challenged over the next two centuries. In the next chapter, we will look in more detail at the idea of the Romantic author that arose out of this conception, at the author as original, autonomous, and fundamentally expressive of a unique individuality....
