A Theory of Early Modern Authorship (original) (raw)

In 16 th-century vernacular literature, authorship is not yet as clearly defined as in later centuries. It is still characterised by the presence of degrees of authorship and makes use of the various concepts of anonymity. Authority and the fictional status of a work are discussed whenever instances of authorship are mentioned in the text. This practice, of course, comes with consequences for the text itself. This chapter will focus on one outstanding example of dealing with authorship: the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587). Though it is a work of imaginative literature, it integrates factual sources with literary invention. The text does not explicitly discuss the circumstance that its parts have been taken from somewhere else and transformed into something else. It does, however, try to emphasise its origin with a single author, namely the protagonist himself.