ABSTRACT
The history of the concept of the author in twentieth-century literary criticism can be seen as a process of gradual semantic attenuation; critical orthodoxies have divested it of a meaning acquired mainly over the course of the nineteenth century. The term 'author' possessed considerable gravity: the author was, among other things, a way in which literature was understood and interpreted. The realist author, however, was not considered a medium only in the context of negative evaluations of realism. The idea that the author possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination originates in eighteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic discussions of sympathy. The author is a second maker, comparable to God who is simultaneously subjective and objective and participates in all his creations: an omni present and invisible, absent yet present God, like the one invoked by Flaubert. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
