Introduction to Writing and the Idea of Authority

To begin nowadays to contemplate the issue of authority in literature as this is reflected in contemporary critical theory and practice is to become fairly quickly aware of a number of ambiguities and paradoxes. To provide an immediate, familiar instance of an area that is much more complex than it seems at first sight, we might consider the current prominence in literary discourse of the word 'subversion.' In literature, it might nowadays appear, 'subversion' has become almost the first demand to be made of the significant modern writer - in the field of postcolonialist studies, for instance, where a good deal of emphasis is currently given, no longer simply to writers writing, but to writers writing back, in intertextual fashion, against the authority of works with well-established places in the received canon, particularly of European literary tradition. The perceived aim - as in a number of other prominent contemporary fields, areas like feminist criticism or queer studies, perhaps - is the subversion of a set of received truisms concerning such binary oppositions as male and female, centre and periphery, or classic and popular literature. The book is a collection of good critical writings illuminating various aspects of the concept of authority in a wide variety of authors and literary and cultural texts drawn from a wide variety of periods of English, Scottish, Irish and postcolonial writing and ranging from the Middle Ages to the present.