Dying to be Read: Gallows Authorship in Late Seventeenth-Century England

In her essay “Dying to be Read”, Margaret Ezell’s explores a media configuration of authorship that literally necessitates the “death of the author” as a condition sine qua non: the printed “dying words” of executed men and women in the Restoration period.  The essay examines this type of “gallows literature” of the 1670 and 1680s as a form of “performed narrative” that highlights “the complexity of seventeenth-century authorship practices”