The subject of literary careers has attracted considerable interest recently among both classicists and students of English and other vernacular literatures. ‘Career criticism’ has emerged as a distinct branch of literary scholarship and criticism. It is to be distinguished from the older fashion for a life-and-works approach to the biographical criticism of an author, and also from the more recent interest in the ancient tradition of authors' lives. Instead of starting from what might be known, or claimed, about the historical life and times of an author, career criticism takes as its starting point the totality of an author's textual output and asks how that oeuvre as a whole shapes itself, both in its intratextual relationships (what kinds of beginnings, middles, and ends are traced in the pattern of an oeuvre), and in the claims it makes to reflect or mould extratextual conditions of production (whether located in the personal history of the author, or in the relationship of the author to political and cultural structures of power and authority). The previous sentence ascribes an agency to the oeuvre in ‘shaping’, ‘reflecting’ or ‘moulding’, an agency that can only be realized through a reader's perception of these processes. ‘Careers’, however, are things that authors, not texts or readers, pursue, and career criticism is unabashed in making the author its focus, always with the recognition that the author is mediated through texts, which in turn are always received by readers.