"How do authors relate to the wider world in which they live and work? What are the mechanisms that make one bestselling author famous well beyond her lifetime while another sinks without trace while still alive? And where does literature fit in to a complex society's attempts to understand itself, both in terms of what it has been and what it has the potential to become? Authors and the World traces how four core modes of authorship have developed and inflect one another in the particular contexts of late 20th- and early 21st-century Germany. In so doing, it provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about what literary authorship is in different places and how it draws in different people from across the Western world."--