Abstract
Surveys the most important of the recent critical debates over the implied author and argues for retaining a fairly conservative version of Booth's original model of the concept, as enhanced by two supplemental principles of interpretation, hypothetical intentionalism and limited pluralism. Hypothetical intentionalism offers a clear rationale and methodology for delimiting the sorts of contextual evidence relevant for textual interpretation; this restriction functions in turn to limit the range of interpretations that would count as plausible or critically interesting.