Introduction

Abstract

Joseph Conrad and the Reader is the first book-length study fully devoted to Joseph Conrad’s relation to the reader, visual theory, and authorship. With regard to authorship, specifically, the leading view in modern literary criticism, notably in structuralist and poststructuralist theories, is Roland Barthes’s notion of the death of the author.1 This book revisits Barthes’s theory and uncovers its theoretical and empirical limits. It provides an alternative critical line that substitutes the idea of the writer’s demise with the theory of authorial dissemination, which is implied in several modern texts, including the writing of Flaubert and Conrad. My contention is that the theory of authorial diffusion advocated in the present discussion renders more fittingly the articulation of power and authority in modern literary texts. For rather than being redundant or impotent as deconstructionists claim, the modern writer remains a powerful epistemic and signifying enterprise. What happens in practice is that the author’s authority is merely reshaped and renegotiated in disguised, elusive forms.KeywordsLiterary WorkBritish ReaderReading PublicReader TheoryTextual MeaningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.