Chapter 3 examines the problem of Homer and the making of the epics. It surveys ancient traditions about Homer, the realities of oral composition, and the long processes by which Iliads and Odysseys took shape. It considers standardization, the transition from voice to page, and the role of epic as public memory, explaining why an ‘author’ figure became necessary.

Chapter 4 treats Norman Mailer’s sui generis Advertisements for Myself as a critical moment in the psychopath’s genealogy. Critics have long debated the text’s generic classification, treating it, on the one hand, as an anthology (an attempt to capitalize on the antecedent self of its author in order to resell his previous work) and, on the other, an autobiography (an attempt to capitalize on the fame of previous work to sell the self that produced it). Both classifications presuppose an antecedent, fixed subject, traditionally held to be the source of the literary text (a vexed issue for theorists of literary interpretation during the period). Reading beyond the problematic racial politics of “The White Negro,” the essay that Mailer placed at the center of the book and whose eponymous hipster hero he dubbed a “philosophical psychopath,” the chapter concentrates on Mailer’s attempt to cast the psychopath as an alternative to the fixed self – an icon of resistance to the massifying and conformist pressures in the domain of domestic labor during the Cold War. The form that resistance takes is the appropriation of the genre of the novel to fashion a protagonist whose biography is his creator’s previous work.

This chapter proposes to show that reading Martin Amis’s representation of women in his London Trilogy today raises a number of issues related to the elusive nature of the author’s voice and values in the text. In Money and London Fields in particular, the violence women are submitted to by the male narrators and characters, even though partaking of the satire Amis brushes upon British society in the 1980s, tends to systematically portray women as victims. However, it must not be forgotten that Amis also introduces a number of female figures of relative empowerment in his novels, whose various forms of agency (murderees, authors, femmes fatales) are worth pointing out. The question as to the reality of this agency has to be raised, however, in the context of the general economy of the simulacrum which Amis’s novels denounce and promote. If Amis’s carnivalesque satires leave nothing unscathed and celebrate the death of all great narratives, how can the feminist narrative be applied to them? It seems that Amis’s own beliefs in the powers and of language and language games provide a key to beginning to answer this question.

This chapter revisits the early New York circle that would become the core of the Beat Generation, focusing on how William Burroughs was mythologized by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as an enigmatic and “inscrutable” figure – simultaneously a mentor, literary underground guide, and embodiment of countercultural authenticity. While Burroughs’s role in shaping Beat sensibilities has been canonized in critical anthologies and biographies, this chapter interrogates the recursive loops of fiction, memoir, and myth that have shaped that reputation. It shows how Kerouac and Ginsberg strategically deployed Burroughs’s persona – banker-turned-junkie, literary sage, and shadowy insider – to confer legitimacy on their own nascent artistic identities. Drawing on works such as Junky, Naked Lunch, and Vanity of Duluoz, alongside correspondence and early collaborations, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ very inscrutability became legible only through Beat mythology. Yet this process ultimately risks reducing the complex multiplicity of Burroughs’s work to a single, romanticized origin story.

This chapter contains an overview of William Burroughs’ collaborative work over the course of a half-decade career, including literary collaborations (with Kells Elvins, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and James Grauerholz) and interactions with filmmakers, musicians, and artists. The discussion is situated within the context of other literary collaborations, considerations of geography (who meets whom and where), mutual affinities that inspire and sustain joint projects, and contemporary theoretical work on authorship (e.g., Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari). In so doing, the chapter invites a reconsideration of notions of single authorship, and a fresh, expanded perspective on Burroughs’ oeuvre. Ultimately, the chapter reflects on the essential ingredients for successful collaborations, as well as various perils and challenges that accompany any collaborative endeavor.

Chapter 1 argues that two major changes in the long eighteenth century brought questions about literary sensorimotor imagery to the fore: first, the blending of classical models of rhetoric with modern philosophical theories about how the mind moves; and second, the proliferation of reproducible printed illustrations. In the first case, because the passions were explained by the flow of humours and animal spirits or the vibration of nerves, emotion was motion in essays on criticism. Dennis, Kames, and Johnson promoted sensorimotor models of reading and writing that, even as pamphlets and periodicals increasingly satirized mind-in-motion models, continued to wield enormous explanatory power in theories about human agency and creativity. In the second case, serpentine line illustrations in works by Cavendish, Hogarth, and Sterne demonstrate how printed images were not only visual cues but also embodied proprioceptive prompts inviting readers to imagine their bodies in motion.

Collaboration is hard, but when done right, it can significantly enhance research quality and productivity. This chapter examines the intricacies of academic partnerships, providing practical guidance for establishing and maintaining successful collaborative relationships. It addresses critical aspects from selecting compatible co-authors to managing authorship disputes and maintaining productive working relationships. The chapter outlines common pitfalls in academic partnerships, including rushed commitments, inadequate planning, and unclear expectations, while providing concrete strategies for avoiding these issues. Special attention is given to the sensitive process of negotiating authorship order and credit attribution, emphasizing the importance of early discussions and written agreements.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

Chapter 6 compares the work of the enslaved poet Ambrosio Echemendía with that of several free authors of African descent, including Juana Pastor (often considered the first woman poet in Cuba), Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, probably the most popular Cuban writer of the century), and África Céspedes (one of the collaborators of Minerva (1888–1889), the first periodical by Black women). Black Cuban writing, the chapter argues, does not begin with Juan Francisco Manzano or Plácido, as most scholars have generally assumed; neither of them reclaimed Blackness in their texts. It makes more sense to argue that it begins with the poetry collection that Echemendía published in 1865 – the first book published in Cuba in which an author self-fashioned as racially stigmatized and questioned this stigma. Through this panoramic view, the chapter traces how a long history of public disidentifications with blackness began to make room for a distinctively Black literature – one that foregrounded and problematized racialized subject positions.

Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

Traditional language histories have often focused narrowly on formal printed texts, produced by educated elite men from urban social elites, largely neglecting the everyday language practices of ordinary people. This chapter introduces the perspective of language history from below, where we shift our focus to these often-overlooked voices, in order to arrive at a fuller and more complete understanding of historical language variation and change. We discuss the challenges faced by investigations of the everyday language of ordinary people, including difficulties in determining actual authorship and interpreting texts produced through delegated writing. Based on case studies and examples from a range of different historical and linguistic contexts, we show how examining ego-documents such as private letters and diaries from lower social ranks can reveal valuable insights and complement and at times even correct our existing view of language histories.

This chapter establishes that the Gospel and Epistles of John do not share a common author, highlighting differences in their reception histories, linguistic features, and ideas.

This chapter demonstrates that although the Johannine texts do not share a real author, they all share a common implied author. All four purport to be works by an invented figure: a supposed eyewitness to the life of Jesus.

The introduction sets up the book’s exploration of the complex relationship between contemporary North American fiction and self-help culture over the past 25 years, arguing that recent writers stage encounters between diverse self-help practices to interrogate changing conceptions of authorship, selfhood, and society. Specifically, I position literary engagements with self-help as a way for writers to negotiate anxieties around individual, social, and writerly agency in a moment when traditional sovereign accounts of selfhood are under pressure from poststructuralist critiques of subjecthood and the shaping forces of systemic power, new technologies, and planetary crisis. I begin with an analysis of Deb Olin Unferth’s graphic novel, I, Parrot, then provide context on self-help in America, from long-standing advice, conduct, and wisdom traditions to today’s diversified, commercialized landscape of guidance literature and practices across the three central themes of the book: authority and public address, time management and productivity, and body and brain improvement. I argue that fiction writers can capture the nuanced sociopolitical paradoxes and multiplicities within self-help culture by bringing critical and creative energies to bear on deconstructing and reimaging its tropes and practices.