Unnamed

A thought experiment: a world in which books are published without the name of the author. Not even a pseudonym. In this world literary criticism must be something very different: no appeals to the author’s biography for explanatory contexts, no way to trace developmental relations between different works by the same author, no categorisations according to gender, class, or ethnicity.

But precisely these losses may be gains: when the author’s persona not longer throws its shadow over the work it may well be that much easier to read it for what it is.