Disappearing Authors and Resentful Readers in Late Nineteenth-Century American Fiction: The Case of Henry James

Genius Trouble

“…Still, a stark depiction can help us understand how passages between the opposing 5. Items in the MLA bibliography indexed with the subject terms "author" or "authorship" were actually slightly greater in number in the 1990s than today, which seems, from a glance at titles, to reflect the state of the response to the Barthes-Foucault disruption. As examples of the discourse beyond Barthes and Foucault, see also Adams 2014, Benjamin 1978, Bennett 2005band 2005c, Bernesmeyer, Buelens, and Demoor 2019, Booth 1983, Bracha 2016, Buurma 2007, Dowling 2009, Fabian 2007, Garcia 1996, Gilbert and Gubar 2000(1976, Hochman 2001, Irwin 2002, Leary and Nash 2009, Nehamas 1987, Rohrbach 2020, West III 1988, Williams 2007, and Woodmansee 1994aand 1994b. Interestingly, "author" is not a term taken up in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams 2014(Williams [1976) nor is it in the revised New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005) -although the latter does contain an entry for "audience".…”

The Author in Literary Theory and Theories of Literature

“…4 Where the nineteenth-century narratorial subject was generally associated with the voice of the actual author, which was made accessible to the reader through the literary work, towards the end of the century "a sense of a growing distance and impersonality" began to alter the relationship between authors and readers, as well as the way in which critics and writers understood the relationship between the written and the writing self, the "private" creative work and the "public" persona of the author. 5 Henry James's artist-tales from the 1890s are particularly illustrative of this gradual transformation not only of the relationship between authors and readers but also of the very "purpose" of literary criticism and its preference for the autonomous work of art. James famously allegorized what would later become known as "the intentional fallacy" committed by critics practicing the biographical method.…”