The relevance of the literary personality—a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices—to the analysis of a literarys work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstructionisls view the literary personality, like the writer's biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a work's intertextuality (interrelationship with other texts), subtexts (unspoken, concealed. or repressed discourses), and metatexts (self-referential aspects), not a perception of a writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical context, they credit a writer with only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However, to readers interested in literary detective work—say scholars of classical (Greek and Roman) literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship— the literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.
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