For thirty years, "the death of the author" has been a familiar poststructuralist slogan in literary theory, widely understood and much-debated as a dismissal of the author, a declaration of
the writer's irrelevance to the reader’s experience. In this concise book, Jane Gallop revitalizes the hackneyed concept by considering not only the abstract theoretical death of the author
but also the writer's literal death, as well as other authorial "deaths," such as obsolescence. Through bravura close readings of the influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially
for the writer. Gallop does not just approach the death of the author from the reader's perspective; she also reflects at length on how the author’s death haunts the writer. By connecting an
author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths, she enables us to take a fuller measure of the moving and unsettling effects of the deaths of the author on readers and writers, and on
reading and writing.
