This book takes Roland Barthess famous proclamation of The Death of the Author as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of the author as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of authorial death by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?
