1 The Genius and the Hive: Travelling Concepts of Authorship in Literature and Culture Ingo Berensmeyer (Justus Liebig University Giessen / Ghent University) The field of authorship studies has become diverse and wide-ranging: from the Middle Ages to the present, from discourse analysis to literary sociology, and from letters to blogs, questions relating to authorship are important to scholars working in literary studies from very different perspectives: historical, systematic, theoretical and genre- related. This paper examines possible reasons for the recent increase in author-related studies and discusses some of the possibilities of pursuing such studies today. But instead of beginning with an exhaustive and exhausting overview of this topic in a strictly top-down approach, I will start with a story: a forgotten piece of short fiction from the late eighteenth century. Its title is 'The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship', and it was published in an ephemeral literary journal, The British Mercury, in 1787. Its most likely author is John Oswald, a Scottish radical who died a few years later fighting for the French Revolutionary Army. 1 'The Brain-Sucker' is told in the form of a letter by a farmer, appropriately named Homely, to an 'absent friend', in which he relates the story of his unfortunate son Dick. Dick's brain has become 'infected' by 1 Thanks to Alise Jameson, who rediscovered this text in the ECCO database while researching for her doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century authorship; a critical annotated edition of the text is in progress. On Oswald, see Henderson 2004.