We have become accustomed to regarding the question of the author in literary criticism and theory in anti-authorial terms. It is a quaintness of modern literary theory that the author, whom we would, commonsensically, expect to be the central agent in the production of the literary work, has, for the most part of the past century, been considered a liminal character of minor importance to literary criticism, and, if not completely dead, then at least a ghost haunting the limits of the literary work of art.