Awards

• Winner of Honorable Mention, Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association Winner, 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for literature, Sixteenth Century Society.
• Winner of Winner, 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for literature, Sixteenth Century Society.

Overview

How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author--both as context and target of textual interpretation--come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon--character, intention, ethos, persona--and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture--the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.

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9780198714163

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Reviews

Force of Character challenges us to reconsider acquiescing too easily in arguments for the death of the author. It invites us instead to reflect on how the related reading and writing practices of early modernity, especially through their prefatory and other paratextual materials, tether authors' characters and intentions not only to their words but to the highly individualized, ethically inflected literary styles and agendas their words underwrite. * Professor Kathy Eden, Columbia University * Our habit of evaluating books based on their author's personality has a history, and in The Force of Character Douglas Pfeiffer identifies a decisive moment in that story, locating the roots of how and why, a half-century ago, Renaissance readers began searching for the life in the works. Learned, lucid, and consistently illuminating, Pfeiffer's contribution to our understanding of authorship and biography is a major one, to which many will be indebted. * Professor James Shapiro, Columbia University *

Author Information

Douglas S. Pfeiffer is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature Department and has taught at Columbia, Barnard College, The Cooper Union, and The University of California, Irvine. His research centers on Renaissance humanism, history of the book, and early modern poetry.

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