The Birth and Death of the Author is a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept. In eight specialist interventions by a diverse group of international scholars it tells a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century.

Andrew J. Power is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Sharjah, UAE. He took his BA (hons) and PhD in English at Trinity College Dublin (1999; 2006) and has since held posts at the University of Cyprus and Saint Louis University - Madrid Campus. He is the editor of Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 (2012), of Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594 (2020), and of a Yearbook of English Studies special issue on Caroline Literature (2014). His forthcoming monograph is entitled Stages of Madness: Sin, Sickness, and Seneca in Shakespearean Tragedy.

Introduction: The Begetting and Forgetting of the Author

Andrew J. Power (University of Sharjah, UAE)

Chapter 1, C15th: Fathering Chaucer: Thoreau, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Invention of the First English Author

Andrew Galloway (Cornell University)

Chapter 2, C16th: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Traces of Authorship

Rory Loughnane (University of Kent)

Chapter 3, C17th: Authorial Identity and Print in John Taylor's Common Whore and Arrant Thiefe Pamphlets

Edel Semple (University College Cork)

Chapter 4, C18th: Samuel Richardson's "Murdering Pen" and the End of the Novel

Natasha Simonova (University of Oxford)

Chapter 5, C19th: Melville's 'Bartleby' and the Prefiguration of the Author's Own Preference Not to Write

William E. Engel (Sewanee, University of the South)

Chapter 6, C20th: La Mort de l'Auteur: James Joyce and the Birth of Writing

Brad Tuggle (University of Alabama)

Chapter 7, C21st: Who is that Knocking on your Door?: Authorship, Print, and the Multimodal Comics of Grant Morrison in a Digital Age

Darragh Greene (University College Dublin)

Bibliography