"Intention is back in fashion," announces James McLaverty in his 1991 essay "Issues of Identity and Intention." He concedes, however, that "the news hasn't traveled very far yet" (149). Fashionable or not, an editor's concept of authorial intention can determine whether a text appears as a clear-reading, eclectic text, such as Eugene Vinaver's Malory: Works, or as a genetic edition such as Hans Gabler's edition of Joyce's Ulysses with "dispersed and differentiated meaning" (Greetham "Intention" 177) . As textual scholar David Greetham notes, "for most textual and some literary critics in the twentieth century--despite the hegemony of formalism …intent has not been a false question, it has been the primary one" ("Intention" 158). In textual theories of the past half-century, intention has been one of the central arenas of discourse in determining how to approach the task of editing a text and how to interpret the resulting text. However, as Annabel Patterson has noted, "[I]ntention is one of the most challenging terms in literary semantics" (135) and the plethora of terms associated with intention--active intention, programmatic intention, final intention, intention to do, intention to mean, recoverable intention, etc.--indicates the complexity of the concept, its resistance to definition, and the wide variety of critical approaches.

The work of Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, Peter Shillingsburg, Steven Mailloux, D. C. Greetham, James McLaverty, and Michael Hancher, while certainly not a comprehensive representation of the discussion of intention, provide some touchstones by which to examine major theoretical stances regarding intention as it has shaped the discourse in textual theory over the last several decades.

In "Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix," Greetham suggests dividing the theoretical territory of authorial intention into three: writer-based theories, text-based theories, and reader-based theories. Writer-based theories, in Greetham's construction, include theorists such as G. Thomas Tanselle , W.W. Greg, and Fredson Bowers. Also in this theoretical position is E.D. Hirsch. The field of writer-based intentionalist critics can also be broadly defined with varying emphasis placed on intention at the moment of origination or the author's "final" intention. Issues of authorial intention are also significant in the work of Hancher, Mailloux, McLaverty and Shillingsburg.

The second of Greetham's categories, text-based theories, can be seen as resulting from the "influence of Formalist/New-Critical decontextualisation of the text" ("Matrix" 8). The work of Wimsatt and Beardsley, although popularized to a broader application than was originally conceived, was influential in the move to remove intention as the primary means by which to judge the success of a work of literature in achieving the author's intention for the work.

Lastly, Greetham defines reader-based theories as those which privilege an aporia or "central knot of indeterminacy" rather than authorial intention as the defining function of a text. According to Annabel Patterson, Michel Foucault's concept of "anonymous discourse" came to supplant authorial intent in postmodernist approaches to texts. Patterson notes that Foucault

devoted much of his Archeology of Knowledge to outlawing all approaches to texts that were ordered by any notion of an author, or an origin, of an oeuvre, or "another's meaning," to use Hirsch's phrase. (143)

This end of the field has been largely defined by "anti-intentionalists" such as Jerome McGann, but there are theoretical overlays with theorists such as Mailloux and, to a certain extent, Greetham, who utilize speech-act theory to negotiate a middle ground or synthesis between writer-based and reader-based theories.

While such divisions as those outlined above are useful, at least initially, in charting the range of critical approaches to intention, they also prove to be paradoxical and, often, circular. What begins as a defense of authorial intention, as in the case of Tanselle, becomes, in the end, an exhortation to look to "the text itself" as the authority for editorial decisions. Nonetheless, these distinctions are useful as a starting point in which to situate theorists under consideration and as a means of unpacking the theoretically complex concept of authorial intention. This inquiry focuses primarily on "writer-based" theories and those which merge writer-based and reader-based theories.