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In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.

Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.

In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.

To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon. 

A critical examination of authorship that traces its historical evolution and asserts its significance from early to late modernity.

From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as cultural capital, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autobiographical and biographical fiction. In response to Roland Barthes’s “removal of the Author” and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s “author function,” different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as multiplicities integrated by agency, performativity, and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.

The book offers a critical reassessment of recent debates on authorship in European and Latin American literature. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflections, ones that take into account the historical development of authorship and shifting understandings of fiction, performativity, and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autobiographical fiction), and discuss the methodologies that reinstate the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of the literary process. It is essential reading for scholars and enthusiasts of literature seeking a deeper understanding of how authorship has evolved and continues to shape literary landscapes.