This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of “critique” that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work explains how “The Intentional Fallacy” confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself.

Intention plays a complex role in human utterances. The interpretation of literary texts is a strong case in point: for about two hundred years there have been conflicting views about whether, and how much, authorial intention should matter when professional readers interpret literature. These debates grew increasingly fierce during the post-World War II period, the landmarks of which were the notions of intentional fallacy and the death of the author. Seventy-odd years later, there is still no consensus in sight. What has always been neglected in the debates around authorial intention, however, is a reflection on the historical dimension of the debate and how historically bound each of the theoretical positions in the debate were. This book focusses precisely on the historical dimension of authorial intention, providing a systematic historical reconstruction of the importance ascribed to it in literary texts from Classical Greece to the present day, and including a chapter on authorial intention in jurisdiction and legal interpretation from a historical perspective. The book reconstructs a typology of the most important concepts of intention in interpretation for diachronic and synchronic use. At the same time it offers insights from a field-theoretical perspective into how literary studies as a discipline works over time and how notions of intention and interpretation help create forms of literary knowledge.

In Biblical Exegesis without Authorial Intention? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Authorship and Meaning, Clarissa Breu offers contributions with a wide range of approaches to the question of the author in biblical interpretation. The volume is an invitation to revisit this question.

The question of intention is central to the study of literature. How far can an author's intentions determine the meanings of his/her text? What do we mean by 'intention' in a literary context? What force does the reader's intention have in the construction of textual meaning? To what extent can a text itself be said to be 'intentional'? The aim of this book is to provide an in-depth analysis and critique of this concept of intention, its uses within the realms of literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy of language, phenomenology and deconstruction, and its potential for redefinition. Mitchell sets out to re-think intention and interrogate the possibilities of an intentionalism more suited to a formalist or textualist critical methodology. She moves from an assessment of the pitfalls of a traditional authorial intentionalism, towards the formulation of an 'intentionality of form', where intention is seen as a formal attribute of the text itself

At the end of the twentieth century literary theorists find themselves reflecting on their discipline. Since at least 1969, the humanities and social sciences have seen the rise of Marxist critical theory, Foucault (or discourse and the new historicism), various schools of American and European cultural studies, deconstruction, and poststructuralism. One of the major coups of the last 30 years, from which all of the previously mentioned theoretical camps benefited, was the attack on and subsequent death of authorial intentionality. In, The Author's Intention co-authors DiTommaso, Mitscherling, and Nayed divert the current philosophical misrepresentation of authorial intention. Implicitly challenging a second-generation theoretical approach to literature that dismisses the possibility of truth, coherent narratives, and, of course, intentionality the authors breathe new life back into "the author" and, also, literary theory. This book is essential reading for anyone in the humanities who has an interest in critical thought, hermeneutics, and all forms of interpretive technique.

A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised (at least in Italy), though its roots may extend back as far as Giorgio Pasquali. This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the first two chapters. By presenting a thorough account of the historical and theoretical framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification. What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didactic value to students and researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the rationale behind different editing practices, and addressing both traditional and newer methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, this ground-breaking volume provokes us to consider important questions concerning a text’s dynamism, the extent to which an author is ‘agentive’, and, most crucially, about the very nature of what we read.