What is it about?
This edited volume provides a window into concepts and practices of authorship in East Asian literatures from the beginnings to the 17th century. Working from a new operational model of authorship developed in the introduction, it illustrates the varying and sometimes surprising ways in which the roles in text production and the images of authorship and authorities relate to each other in works as different as Chinese bronze inscriptions, Korean songs, or Zen Buddhist literature.
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Why is it important?
The introduction contains a new model of authorship that makes productive use on the discussions of the "death of the author", but also on "collaborative authorship" in digital media and so forth. The various case studies provide a well differentiated view of the modes of production and reception of texts, and the role of "authors" on both sides. It serves to counterbalance the orientalist discourse that reduces authorship in Asia to a very limited number of canonical figures. This volume also shows how the analysis of historic Asian texts and author concepts can contribute to the development of the theory of authorship.
Perspectives
Working on this volume was a great pleasure as it brought me together with a host of renowned experts from fields that are a bit more distant from my own. Writing the introduction with Christian Schwermann was an important part of this pleasure, as together we moved to ask, and answer, fundamental questions.
Professor Raji C. Steineck
University of Zurich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: That Wonderful Composite Called Author, July 2014, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004279421.
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