This website will explore the ways that the authorial name of John Wilmot, the second earl of Rochester, has been constructed throughout the centuries.
I will begin with a short account of Lord Rochester and his life and times,  how society has constructed various roles for Rochester and this construction has created a unique problem in the dissemination of his works. After that, I will discuss how the concept of the author was defined by two French critics, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. From there I will go into a discussion how Rochester complicates Barthes and Foucault's idea of the author and claim that even though Barthes and Foucault's paradigms are useful in starting any discussions of the authority of Rochester, Rochester in the end eludes these two critics' definitions. I end with a (pretentious) critique of Barthes and Foucault, a lowly graduate student yapping at the feet of two giants of twentieth century literary theory.