A History of Ideas About the Author

This chapter outlines literature which has been collected under the umbrella of ‘author studies’ or ‘writing about writers’ in which the writer appears in both abstract and concrete forms. It examines the history of ideas around authorship including the philosophical disappearance of the writing individual and looks at some of the work about the ‘real writer’ in relation to the publishing industry, which is mostly found in publishing or literary studies. It considers the few studies which approach writing as cultural work and, finally, it offers a categorisation of non-academic texts about writers and writing which, it is suggested, play a role in setting the terms of the discourses employed by writers when talking about themselves as workers.