Jerome McGann

Jerome McGann is the critic who proved, with archival patience, that the author on the cover of a book has never been the only author—and that the convention of single authorship conceals a collaborative reality that is structural, not accidental. His foundational insight, developed across A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), The Romantic Ideology (1983), and The Textual Condition (1991), is that every published text is the product of a social process involving multiple agents—editors who restructure arguments, publishers whose commercial calculations determine what reaches the public, designers who shape how a text is read—and that the convention of single authorship absorbs all of these contributions into a single attribution while rendering the contributors invisible. The name on the cover is not a fact. It is an economic convenience that serves the publishing industry's need for a marketable brand and the reader's desire for a coherent fiction of origin. The Romantic authorship construct—the solitary