Expanding Authorship collects Peter Middleton's significant essays exploring how the agency of the disputed figure of the author has increasingly extended beyond an individual, narratable self. In four sections--Sound, Communities, Collaboration, and Complexity--Middleton explores the internal divisions of lyric subjectivity as well as coauthorship, poetry networks, the creative role of editors and anthologists, and the outer limits of authorship revealed in long poems. Readers and scholars of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rae Armantrout will find much to learn and enjoy in this groundbreaking volume.

Peter Middleton is an emeritus professor in the Department of English at the University of Southampton. He is the author and editor of several books, including Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry.