Oscar Wilde on the Theory of the Author

Throughout his career Oscar Wilde battled his contemporaries' tendency to look at literary works through the lens of the author. He held that the practice of reading for the author misses the point of why we should turn to literature in the first place, and that it runs into a number of ethical, methodological, and metaphysical problems. Here I reconstruct Wilde's position from his various pronouncements in his essays, reviews, letters, and fiction, and argue that the ideal that emerges of letting the work speak for itself should still be taken seriously by philosophers and scholars of literature.