ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the relationship between texts and meaning, between authors and readers. It is often assumed that the author determines the meaning of a text. However, the reader also has a role to play. The conventional way of understanding a text as what the author intended makes a number of questionable assumptions about meaning, biographical certainty, authorial presence and evaluation. If the author is dead, and reading to discover her or his secret hidden intention is no longer the only logical course to take, there are new questions to ask. The role of the author is an invention, developed in the eighteenth century. The term author still functions as an indication of style, genre or, perhaps wrongly, of quality. However, the meaning in the text relies more on people's interaction with it than on the writer's intention.
