Beginnings

Abstract

Through a wide-angle exposition of the history of authorship that takes us back to Mesopotamia, Ancient Greec,e and Early China as well as medieval Europe, this chapter shows how, for much of human life, textuality and authorship were mutually imbricated constructs. Not only have readers regularly sought out biographical details to illuminate literary fictions; they also in many instances treated literary texts not as a goal in their own right, but rather as a means of shedding light on life stories. Furthermore, authors routinely drew previously existing texts back into their own ambit, working on them as compilers or commentators, not least in order to shore up their own identity. When these trends are seen across the longue durée of world literary history in its most expansive sense, a quite different understanding of what it might mean to author a text emerges that draws on fundamentally different notions of individuality and origin from those that are routinely—and perhaps quite misleadingly—invoked in the modern period.