From Shakespeare to Autofiction

Book excerpt: 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. Praise for From Shakespeare to Autofiction 'In this collection a multicultural group of literary scholars analyse a rich array of authorship types and models across four centuries. After decades of liquid poststructuralist concepts, it is refreshing and inspiring to think through such diversity of authorship strategies – from oral culture, through sociological constructs, to self-referential and autobiographical ontological games that writers play with us, their readers.' Pavel Drábek, University of Hull