The Reader as Author

Authors

  • Gillian Beer University of Cambridge

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i1.1066

Keywords:

Gillian Beer, Authorship, readers, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll

Abstract

"The Reader as Author" explores how readers become co-authors of the literary experience, through the imaginative act of filling gaps or, indeed, through their resistance to authorial propositions. The “virtual witnessing” in Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and the companionable tone of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books—testify to the broad range of literary genres that invite readers to interact with and react to “author” texts beyond the initial writer’s control.

Author Biography

Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a former President of Clare Hall. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature as well as an invited member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. A number of universities have given her honorary doctorates including Oxford, the Sorbonne, Harvard and St. Andrews. Her books include Darwin's Plots (third edition, CUP, 2009), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford University Press, 1996), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) and Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: the collected and annotated poems of Lewis Carroll (Penguin Classics, 2012). She is General Editor of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture.

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Published

2014-03-31

How to Cite

Beer, G. (2014). The Reader as Author. uthorship, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i1.1066

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2014)

Section

Special Topic: Reconfiguring Authorship

License

Authorship allows authors to hold both the copyright and the publishing rights over their work without restrictions. However, a mention of their first publication in Authorship will be highly appreciated.