authorial

Authorial is an adjective relating to authors or authorship. It derives from author, which in turn comes from the Latin auctor meaning "founder, promoter, author." In literary and academic usage, authorial describes features connected with the author or the act of authoring, such as authorial voice, authorial intention, or authorial presence.

Authorial voice refers to the recognizable style, attitude, and personality that can be identified as the writer’s own within a text. It may appear in description, argument, or narration, and can persist across works. In contrast to the voice of a narrator or a character, the authorial voice denotes the author’s own stance, perspective, or influence on interpretation.

Authorial intention or the author’s intent concerns what the author aimed to communicate or achieve. Critics differ on the weight of intention: some emphasize authorial purpose, while others argue that the text itself allows multiple readings independent of the author’s aims, a view associated with reader-response and formalist approaches, or with the concept of the intentional fallacy.

The term also appears in discussions of editing and publication, referring to aspects tied to the author’s status, such as authorial signature, stylistic traits, or revisions made by the author to the manuscript.

In scholarship, authorial considerations are balanced against narratorial reliability, reader interpretation, and contextual analysis. The word remains common in literary criticism, textual studies, and discussions of how a writer’s identity and aims shape a work.