Chapter 1 introduces the story in Samuel and the theological paradoxes that emerge from the book. It surveys possibilities regarding who might have written it, when, and why, and considers how far it is a historical narrative and how far it is a piece of imaginative literature.

Authors are commonly thought to have a privileged position when it comes to the interpretation of their texts. Since treaties are consensual instruments, it is not surprising that the parties have a say in the interpretation of their treaties. At the same time, treaties cannot escape what is the fate of every text: the possibility to read a text in the absence of its author is structurally inscribed in it. This chapter examines the ways in which the parties can influence treaty interpretation in various phases of the life of the treaties. It also accounts for the diminishing state authority in the modern practice of treaty interpretation.

This chapter addresses problems in the philosophy of interpretation with regard to Latin authors. Its central question is what we mean by the ‘author’. The history of ‘persona’, the notion that the speaker in first-person literature and by extension the image of the author presented in any text is a ‘mask’, is explored for its theoretical and interpretive value, but also critiqued for the potential ethical and political issues it raises. The author should be considered not a window onto the life of the flesh-and-blood Roman, but rather as a construct arising in part, but only in part, from an initial human consciousness living in a specific historical place and time, then developed through a dynamic process of reception. The battle for the life and soul of the author is the story of interpretation, in which the question of the extent to which ‘original intention’ can or should be the goal of exegesis was one of the great controversies of the 20th century and remains a creatively unsolvable problem. I argue that there are certain kinds of readings which are rightly and explicitly situated outside the scope of ‘original intention’, of which I take feminist readings as exemplary.

Submitted manuscripts usually have an arduous journey, while also having the potential to make significant contributions that reach wide and relevant audiences. In this chapter, I offer a path and guidelines for journal submissions; this includes both the editor’s perspective on handling submitted manuscripts and implications for the authors. Although journals may vary in how manuscripts are handled, the following three main phases most likely occur in some form: (1) submissions are screened to determine their appropriateness for a journal; (2) manuscripts that remain after screening are usually assigned to reviewers by the editor or associate editor; and (3) manuscripts that remain after the review process are accepted and published. I’m hopeful that the information will be helpful to editors and authors by elucidating the process of handling submitted manuscripts and improving the chances of successful and productive contributions.

Romances’ formal innovations and authorial self-consciousness are studied from another angle by Sylvie Lefèvre, who examines the variety of authorial framing techniques and narratorial interventions in French romance. Although we possess little information about historical authors before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many stories call attention to their creators, sometimes billed as an “acteur,” who can assert himself (or, more rarely, herself) in numerous guises: as an omniscient narrator who animates the dialogue of characters; as a parallel persona who compares his amorous affair to that of his characters; as an intradiegetic narrator who plays a role inside the story beside the characters; as a full-blown amorous persona himself, who describes the progress of his affair; or as a pseudohistorical agent based on a historical author from the previous century. Whether in verse or prose, in intradiegetic or extradiegetic narration, romances proved fertile ground for artistry, experimentation, and innovation, first in French and later in other European traditions. While some authors remain firmly entrenched inside the fiction of their creations, others created bridges to “real” incidents beyond the tale, blurring the distinction between fiction and history in ways that anticipate the modern novel.

The idea of a narrator that is distinct from the author is a basic tenet of narratology. In ancient criticism, however, this idea absent. What is more, ancient critics tended to ascribe utterances of characters in general to authors. This, I argue, is not a deficiency but the expression of a distinctly ancient view of voice, which I reconstruct on the basis of a wide array of texts. Where we see several narrative levels nested into each other, ancient authors and readers envisaged narration as an act of impersonation. One upshot of my analysis is that, while it may be intriguing to explore metalepseis in ancient literature, the very idea of metalepsis conflicts with the premises of narrative as it was understood in antiquity. The ancient view of narration can be linked at least partly to the prominence of performance and therefore reveals the impact of socio-cultural factors; at the same time, it resonates with recent cognitive theory, notably embodied and enactive models of cognition.

Thucydides is only rarely a tangible presence in the narrative of the Peloponnesian War. This chapter shows how the ‘narrator-less’ style of Thucydides’ narration of the war is central to his construction of authority and to the authority of the text. It examines the ways in which Thucydides’ authorial presence is manifested in the work, in both explicit and less explicit ways. And it offers a detailed analysis of the ‘Archaeology’ and its surrounding practice, arguing that this section of the work is the most explicit and sustained instance of Thucydidean self-fashioning.

The chapter places Churchill’s lifespan firmly within ‘the golden age of print’. It looks at his apprenticeship as a writer, served while in the army, explaining how his early books helped him earn the war chest that allowed him to launch his political career, before showing how his shrewd and selective use of sources for his biography of Lord Randolph Churchill allowed him to reconcile his role as a defender of his father’s political legacy with his own move to the Liberal Party. Churchill’s working methods also changed as he entered government. He used a team to help produce his multi-volume history of the First World War in order to defend his role in the Dardanelles operation. Thereafter, Churchill had to juggle managing his tax liability as an author with his need for more income, but by the 1930s he was committed to several major publishing projects. After the war, he sought to capitalise on his premiership through his multi-volume histories of the Second World War and the History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The chapter analyses how Churchill managed his various literary projects, sheds light on his own role in the creative process and looks at how this changed over time.

Molière’s publishing career highlights the ambiguities and eccentricities of the early modern Parisian book trade, while also demonstrating the author’s concern for his plays’ passage from stage to page. While Molière was initially victimised by unscrupulous booksellers, he eventually became an able participant in the publication process, capable of exploiting print’s possibilities to his own advantage. His career can be roughly divided into three phases: his early and ultimately successful battles against pirated editions that led to a stable publishing approach; his mid career rupture with his initial publishers and the resultant search for new partners; and his subsequent collaboration with Jean Ribou, including the alternative publication measures taken as a result of Ribou’s continued legal troubles. While on occasion Molière disavowed an interest in publication rhetorically, his actual practice reveals an author invested in the circumstances of his works’ printing and inventive in his interactions with Parisian publishers, in some instances even outmanoeuvring the professionals of the book trade. Working in an era prior to modern copyright protections, Molière learned to use publication, the royal privilege system, and personal notoriety to ensure ownership and control over his theatrical corpus.

During his lifetime and afterwards, Molière was frequently and favourably compared to Plautus and Terence by early modern commentators, despite the relative paucity of direct imitation or borrowing. Only three Molière plays have clear ties to classical sources: Amphitryon, L’Avare and Les Fourberies de Scapin. Even in these cases, Molière demonstrates a constant interest in updating, adapting, or even subverting his illustrious models, while also ostentatiously rejecting the authority of classical rules. However, in this regard Molière may be imitating the traditions of classical comedy more authentically than his early modern peers recognised. Terence and Plautus were criticised in their own time for their ‘contamination’ of sources, and their free use of prior plays and comedic tropes points to a freewheeling borrowing that is close to Molière’s in spirit. In addition, the Roman playwrights’ method of performing authorship, featured most prominently in the prologues to Terence’s plays, demonstrates a similar interest in stoking controversy and rejecting pedantic rules in favor of the audience’s pleasure. Molière may well have been classical, but precisely in those ways that most irritated his classically minded contemporaries.

This introductory chapter aims at giving an overview of the pervasiveness of the second-person pronoun across genres, from advertising and political slogans to Twitter via ‘you narratives’ as literature too has taken its ‘you’-turn. Starting from a linguistic template based on face-to-face interactions and adapting it to make it fit written narratives, the chapter offers a theoretical modelling of the possible references of ‘you’, given the degree of congruence between form and function, that could apply to both fictional and non-fictional texts. The pragma-rhetorical approach adopted here foregrounding the author–reader channel allows to transcend the divide between ‘you narratives’ and other genres using the pronoun that the literature has tended to keep separate. It highlights the ethicality of the second-person pronoun as readers are brought to negotiate their relation to the pragmatic effects of ‘you’ in the wide variety of texts investigated in the following chapters. The model that is designed in this chapter gives pride of place to the flesh and blood reader and her potential self-ascription as addressee even in cases where there is only an ‘effect of address’.

Chapter 1 introduces the object of this monograph: to present a new reading of the complete works of Constantine Manasses, thereby offering a potential model for analysing other authorships based on commission and patronage. The primary focus here is on the key concept of occasional literature and its specific position between writer and patron, fiction and reality. The latter is defined in terms of two kinds of referentiality: on the one hand, the text’s connection to the occasion (pretext/performance); on the other, its (literary/potentially fictive) representation of a ‘reality’ that is relevant to that occasion. It is assumed that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional poetry and rhetoric had central positions, therefore called for a strong and individual voice of the author, since the voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.

Chapter 4 examines the Encomium of Michael Hagiotheodorites and a series of letters preserved in the same manuscript. Taking its point of departure from Umberto Eco’s distinction between the empirical and the model author, the analysis focuses on the story of a writer in trouble that can be reconstructed based on the encomium and the letters. The encomium offers an elaborate praise of the learning of the addressee, but there is also a more urgent message: the writer is in trouble and he needs the help of the powerful Michael to explain to the emperor that he has been slandered by his enemies. The three letters offer further clues as to the social and historical circumstances of this situation, representing a writer who saves himself from a difficult situation by mobilizing a network of friends. Regardless of Manasses’ own experiences, that situation may well reflect the reality of a Komnenian writer on command.

This chapter focuses on a basic model of professional communication and two basic goals of journal article publication. It has five major sections, Intuitive Thoughts, Frank and Neil, Professional Communication, Scientific Research, and Practical Suggestions. It starts with a discussion of intuitive thoughts of graduate students and then a discussion of two real-life cases (Frank and Nell) so that we can see how new authors think and act related to the central question of the chapter. After that, two core concepts, professional communication and scientific research, are discussed in detail, followed by several practical suggestions. In brief, there are two major reasons why we publish journal articles, that is, to develop skills of professional communication and ultimately to advance scientific knowledge and to improve human life.

Building on earlier accounts of print culture that consider its cultural work in puritan America, this essay considers where, how, and for whom print culture does and does not work. Informed by the “bummer theory” of print culture developed by Trish Loughran, Lara Cohen, and Jordan Stein, this account attempts to read slippages and silences alongside the familiar print performances of the era. Puritan print culture is inherently transatlantic, and understanding the affordances and obstacles presented by having this big, wet, and cold barrier between authors, presses, and audiences is crucial to understanding the vagaries of print for writers and readers in this era. Beyond physical barriers, there are also considerable social and cultural barriers, barriers that serve as a filter which produces the overwhelmingly orthodox, male, and white corpus of print that constitutes a major portion of the archive of puritan settlement. Finally, this essay considers the affordances and obstacles in place today that shape which puritan texts are available where and to whom.

If the written word is to be our principal source in this study, in which historical accounts are used to shed light on the institutions that gave rise to them, then we need a fairly comprehensive sense of what that source represents. Accordingly, this chapter is concerned with the epistemological status of writing as a “window” on the past and, more specifically, the viability of using it to understand long-extinct political systems.

After a short status quaestionis laying out the main perspectives from which the book of Revelation has been studied, we show how the study of the reading guidelines laid out in the Introduction have hitherto been overlooked. We propose the methodology to follow in order to discover them. According to the reading theory, every reader creates a ‘model’ through which the sense is grasped and the text interpreted. The elaboration of this model involves a process of ‘disassembling the mechanism without ruining it; disassembling it until the keys to its organisation are found’, according to Alonso Schökel. This process is what we will examine in the following chapters.

The introduction explores the reasons why eighteenth-century authors decided to revise their novels and examines the trope of revision alongside advances in digital humanities, manuscript culture, novel studies, and actor-network theory.It opens with a discussion of Frances Burney’s Cecilia manuscript and the revelatory possibilities of revision, leading to a discussion of the novel genre during the eighteenth century as it was conceived by novelists themselves and the novel’s indebtedness to the dramatic and scholarly prose genres.The final section of the introduction applies Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to delineate a model of eighteenth-century novel authorship that I term “networked authorship,” in which novelists, members of their literary and familial circles, reviewers, and their previous selves participate in the creation of a text.