‘Authors’, Mark Rose proposes, ‘do not really create in any literal sense, but rather produce texts through complex processes of adaptation and transformation.’ The study of the practice of such transformations is different from the study of ‘authorship’ as ‘a free creative source of the meaning of a book’, which, Diane Macdonnell avers, ‘is not a concept that exists within discourses that have developed recently’. James Clifford reports that ‘The general tendency in modern textual studies has been to reduce the occasion of a text's creation by an individual subject to merely one of its generative or potentially meaningful contexts.’ Yet Edward Said, for one, demurs from this orthodoxy:

To identify authorship as a form of human work is to validate individual agency.