This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions? The book features an array of  historical to present-day examples, in a range of media including theatre, performance, literature, film, and visual. It will appeal to readers interested in theatre and performance theory and practice, literature, intertextuality, cultural studies, aesthetics, and politics in relation to issues of accountability and censorship, gender, and postcolonial practices.weiterlesen