CONCEPT
The Solitary Author Convention
The three-century-old practice of attributing published texts to a single originating consciousness — a compression so institutionally embedded it has ceased to register as a compression.
The convention of single authorship is the default attribution practice of modern Western publishing: one name on the cover, absorbing all other contributions into invisibility. McGann's scholarship demonstrates that the convention is not a description of how texts are made but an economic and institutional arrangement that emerged alongside the modern publishing industry and the legal apparatus of copyright. Before the eighteenth century, attribution was more fluid; medieval manuscripts circulated without stable authorship, Renaissance workshops produced texts whose collaborative origins the finished product did not record. The solitary author is a modern phenomenon, and the AI moment has exposed the distance between the convention and the reality it was designed to conceal.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The convention serves multiple participants simultaneously. The named author receives credit and cultural capital. The editor receives a salary and professional satisfaction without the burden of public accountability. The publisher receives a marketable brand around which to organize promotion and distribution. The reader receives a coherent