Introduction: The Greats escape

In any large city, you will find testaments to the ‘greats’ of literature. Visitors to the Mall in Central Park, New York, for example, will encounter statues, not only of Shakespeare, but also of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Walter Scott (1771-1832), and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), the first statue of an American to be placed in the park. Ten years after his death, Halleck was apparently still so beloved that over 30,000 adoring fans came to the unveiling of his statue by the us president (today few people will recognise his name). Whether they take the form of statues or of street names, these public tributes to writers (almost invariably male writers) generally date from the late nineteenth century. They represent a period in which culture was primarily approached in terms of outstanding individuals. Cultural heritage – literature, painting, music – was like a national team of gifted ‘great men.’ Reflecting this idea, the academic study of literature and the other arts was conducted along biographical lines, focusing on ‘the man and his work.’ Even today, one can find humanities courses designed around the oeuvre of individual authors, composers, and artists. But starting in the second half of the twentieth century, critics began to question this biographical approach, as the marginalisation of women writers and authors from the global south began to be questioned as well.

Of course, individual writers (male and female) play a key role in the making of literature. Without writers there would be no texts for others to read, publish, and review. Novels and poems usually fly under the banner of an author's name and if that name is already famous, any new work is guaranteed some measure of public interest. If you were asked to identify the core of the Western canon, you would probably come up with a list of writers (Shakespeare, Dante, etc.) rather than the titles of individual plays, stories, or poems. These names are in a very real sense a guarantee of quality.

Scholars of literature try to establish whether or not the work of a given author is innovative. We also try to understand the process whereby authors ‘make a name’ for themselves and their subsequent role in public life. In contemporary literary studies, then, individual authors continue to be relevant. But they are no longer seen as anchors of meaning as they were some forty years ago. Or rather, the question of individual creativity is posed differently in the context of contemporary understandings of texts and how they are made.