Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises

to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the

relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a

detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have

responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author

postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural

history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key

case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and

Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then,

examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses

to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order

to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and