Every theory has its pet names. What does Textual Criticism think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Literature is made up of a mess of manuscripts, a number of textual documents competing for authoritative status.
What is an author?
An author is someone who writes a literary work. Determining the author's intentions is a huge part of the work of Textual Criticism.
What is a reader?
Textual critics sort through this mess of manuscripts to arrive at the most authoritative version of a literary work for readers, who often read these authoritative versions without quite realizing that someone had to do some hard work to figure out just what that text should look like.