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through productions and editions of the plays and representations of the writer as a cultural figure.

Teague, Frances (1994) (ed.) Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare, Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Genre-focused collection of essays that addresses relations of literary text and performance and Shakespeare as author-function across cultures and time.


Vickers, Brian (1993) Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, London: Yale University Press. Argues against trends in critical theory as “appropriations” of Shakespeare that sacrifice useful criticism for ideological campaigning.

II Theoretical background

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. A central study of how language, which is dialogized or replete with multiple and contradictory meanings, informs literary form. The chapter ‘‘Dialogism in the Novel” is most relevant.

Barthes, Roland (1977) “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath (ed.) New York: Hill & Wang. A seminal essay in contemporary theory arguing that an author figure only serves to limit a text by providing a final signified; removing the author opens up a plurality of meanings.


Fish, Stanley (1980) “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” in Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Argues that literary “meaning” is the product of interpretive communities, who read texts in certain contexts to get their meanings.

Foucault, Michel (1984) “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, Peter Rabinow (ed.), trans. Josué V.Harari, New York: Pantheon Books. Complicates “the death of the author” as outlined by Roland Barthes by suggesting that the “author function” will persist, constraining texts in various ways. While all discourse can be appropriated, the author comes into being when discourse is transgressive and the author is therefore subject to punishment.


Greenblatt, Stephen (1989) “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, H.Aram Veeser (ed.), New York: Routledge. A general overview of the new historicism; specifically addresses the relationship between social and aesthetic discourse.

Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Analysis of literary canon

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