Authors not only create artworks. In the process of creating, they simultaneously bring to life their author personae. Approaching this phenomenon from an interdisciplinary point of view, Sonja Longolius develops a concept of »performative authorship« by examining different strategies of becoming an author. In regard to the notion of her concept, this work offers a critical and comparative analysis of the works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Specifically, Auster/Calle and Breitz/Foer form a generational pair of opposites, enabling a discussion of postmodern and post-postmodern artistic strategies of »performative authorship«.

The figure of the auteur continues to haunt the study of film, resisting both the poststructuralist charges that pointed to its absence and the histories of production that have described its pitfalls. In an era defined by the instability of identities and the recycling of works, Performing Authorship offers a refreshingly new take on the cinematic auteur, proposing that the challenges that once accelerated this figure's critical demise should instead pump new life into it. This book is about the drama of creative processes in essay, documentary and fiction films, with particular emphasis on the effects that the filmmaker's body exerts on our sense of an authorial presence. It is an illuminating analysis of films by Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Agnes Varda, Orson Welles, Jean Rouch, Eduardo Coutinho and Sarah Turner that shows directors shifting between opposite movements towards exposure and masking, oscillating between the assertion and divestiture of their authorial control. In the process, Cecilia Sayad argues, the film author is not necessarily at the work's origin, nor does it constitute the end product. What this new concept of performing authorship describes is the making and unmaking of a subject.

Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression.

Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.

This book discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century.

Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.

This volume represents the current state of research on picture books and other adjacent hybrid forms of visual/verbal texts such as comics, graphic novels, and book apps, with a particular focus on texts produced for and about young people. When Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: the Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books was published almost three decades ago, it was greeted as an important contribution to studies in children’s picture books and illustration internationally; and based substantially on it, Nodelman has recently been named the 2015 recipient of the International Grimm Award for children’s literature criticism. In the years since Words About Pictures appeared, scholars have built on Nodelman’s groundbreaking text and have developed a range of other approaches, both to picture books and to newer forms of visual/verbal texts that have entered the marketplace and become popular with young people. The essays in this book offer 'more words' about established and emerging forms of picture books, providing an overview of the current state of studies in visual/verbal texts and gathering in one place the work being produced at various locations and across disciplines. Essays exploring areas such as semiological and structural aspects of conventional picture books, graphic narratives and new media forms, and the material and performative cultures of picture books represent current work not only from literary studies but also media studies, art history, ecology, Middle Eastern Studies, library and information studies, and educational research. In addition to work by international scholars including William Moebius, Erica Hateley, Nathalie op de Beeck, and Nina Christensen that carries on and challenges the conclusions of Words about Pictures, the collection also includes a wide-ranging reflection by Perry Nodelman on continuities and changes in the current interdisciplinary field of study of visual/verbal texts for young readers. Providing a look back over the history of picture books and the development of picture book scholarship, More Words About Pictures also offers an overview of our current understanding of these intriguing texts.

Based on empirical research, this innovative book explores issues of performativity and authorship in the theatre world under copyright law and addresses several inter-connected questions: who is the author and first owner of a dramatic work? Who gets the credit and the licensing rights? What rights do the performers of the work have? Given the nature of theatre as a medium reliant on the re-use of prior existing works, tropes, themes and plots, what happens if an allegation of copyright infringement is made against a playwright? Furthermore, who possesses moral rights over the work? To evaluate these questions in the context of theatre, the first part of the book examines the history of the dramatic work both as text and as performative work. The second part explores the notions of authorship and joint authorship under copyright law as they apply to the actual process of creating plays, referring to legal and theatrical literature, as well as empirical research. The third part looks at the notion of copyright infringement in the context of theatre, noting that cases of alleged theatrical infringement reach the courts comparatively rarely in comparison with music cases, and assessing the reasons for this with respect to empirical research. The fourth part examines the way moral rights of attribution and integrity work in the context of theatre. The book concludes with a prescriptive comment on how law should respond to the challenges provided by the theatrical context, and how theatre should respond to law. Very original and innovative, this book proposes a ground-breaking empirical approach to study the implications of copyright law in society and makes a wonderful case for the need to consider the reciprocal influence between law and practice.

This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.

Incorporation, Authorship, and Anglo-American Literature (1815–1918) is concerned with the new ways in which nineteenth-century authors came to imagine nationhood in response to the emergent global market. It investigates how authors negotiated a largely unregulated global economic space, both imaginatively—in their representations of it—and pragmatically, through author-publisher agreements to circumvent the lack of transnational copyright or through market-driven self-censorship for different audiences. Until now, scholarship has struggled to find a single dynamic from which to consider the Anglo-American transatlantic cultural field, and transnational fields more generally. This volume offers that single dynamic through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that brings together the research areas of literary and transnational studies with economic history. It shows how the positional national identities constructed by nineteenth-century texts were informed by economic self-interest in the emergent global marketplace. Through a series of case studies the book analyses how contemporary economic innovations determined nineteenth-century concepts of national and cultural self-identification. Presented within four main body chapters, each considers two case studies of nineteenth-century authors that are in productive contrast, including pairings between Herman Melville and Washington Irving, E.D.E.N. Southworth and Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and finally Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.