Abstract
In the current media environment where media audiences are faced with a broad diversity of sources, the question of how media audiences perceive authorial presence in the text, understand it, and use it in the interpretation of the text, gains new importance. Building on the text-reader metaphor central to the audience and reception studies tradition, this paper re-introduces the subject of the author into the audience research debate.
It explores what characteristics and qualities audiences attribute, or not, to various instances of authorial presence and how they use them in meaning making. The paper argues that audiences (un)consciously perceive an authorial presence, or its absence, behind a text and use it as a tool in co-determining the context of a text and its meaning.
The concept of an imagined author is thus introduced: a result of the text-reader encounter but also subsequently co-determining it, where the notion of the author suggested by the text is realized by the reader through their prior knowledge and expectations of an author.