Uncoupled:OR How I Lost My Author(s)

Abstract

The essay traces the personal history of trying to find an author, in the sense of a number of attempts to identify a father figure with whom an editorial and critical career might be linked. Describing such devices as the mapping out of a comprehensive series of abstract models for charting the relationships between a translated and a translating text (in the case of John Trevisa) and the construction of an authorial idiolect where no autograph survives (in the case of Thomas Hoccleve), the personal narrative now regards these attempts to reach back into the authorial psyche as hubristic, even improper. In the place of such a single authorial identity, the essay concludes by showing how authoriality rather than authorship took over in the development of a scholarly career, resulting in, for example, the founding of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship.