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Why do writers so often write about writers? This book offers the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature, arguing that our notions of literary genius - and what it means to be an author - are implicitly shaped by and explicitly challenged in novels about novelists, a genre that has been critically underexamined. Employing both close and distant reading techniques to analyse a large corpus of author-stories, The Novelist in the Novel explores the forms and functions of author-stories and the characters within them, offering a new theory that frames these works as textual sites at which questions of literary value and the cultural conceptions around authorship are constantly being negotiated and revised in a form of covert criticism aimed directly at readers. While nineteenth-century novels about novelists reveal a pervasive frustration with the market - a starving artist vs. commercial sell-out dichotomy - modernist examples of the genre focus on the development of the individual author-as-artist, entirely aloof from the marketplace and from the literary sphere at large. Yet, each of these dynamics is gendered, with women denigrated to commercial producers and men elevated to artists, and while the canon has largely supported the male view of authorship, a closer look at the work of women writers from this period reveals concerted attempts to counteract it. "Silly Lady Novelists" are pitted against serious male modernists in a battle to define what it means to be a literary genius.
List of contents
Novels about Novelists: An Undetected Epidemic?
The Author-Story in Criticism
Reading Closely, from a Distance
A Theory of the Author-Story
The Rise of Novels about Novelists
PART I: Writing to Survive (1850-1899)
1. Narratives of Failure: The Artist and His Antagonists in Victorian-Author Stories
Poverty as Purity in Carlyle's "The Hero as Man of Letters"
From Pot-Boiler to Polemic: Herman Melville's Pierre
Pardoning the "unpardonable sin" in George Gissing's New Grub Street
Failing to Succeed and Succeeding in Failure: Mixed Metaphors in Henry James's Author-Stories
Conclusions
2. Woman or Writer? Silly Lady Novelists and New Woman Writers
Silly Lady Novelists and the New Woman Writer
An Impasse: Olympia's Journal
The Story of a Modern Woman by "A Spinster of Independent Means"
George Paston: A Writer of Books
Red Pottage: Mary Cholmondeley's "Child of the Brain"
Conclusions
PART II: After the Great Divide (1900-1950)
3. The Poet in the Prose: Childhood and Romanticism in the Modernist Künstlerroman
The Autobiographical Künstlerroman
A Romantic Connection: The Child and the Poet
Tonio Kröger: Thomas Mann's "Favorite Literary Child"
James Joyce's Portrait of the Poet as a Prose Writer
Thomas Wolfe's Long Look Homeward
Conclusions
4. "Buried at the Cross-Roads": The Disappearing Acts of Women Writers
Masculinity, Modernity, Celebrity
Where are all the Women Writers?
"Probably they all wrote, except the women": Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage
Edith Wharton's Modernist and His Muse
"The buried woman...the great man": Dawn Powell's Turn, Magic Wheel
Conclusions
CODA: The Author-Story after 1950
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Index
About the author
Elizabeth King guest lectures and tutors at the University of New South Wales, where she has taught for the last five years. Her work has appeared in Geniuses, Addicts and Scribbling Women: Portraits of the Writer in Popular Culture (2023), and she is the co- editor of Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority and Fictionality (2023) with Alison Gibbons. She currently works as an editor at Simon & Schuster Australia.
Summary
Why do writers so often write about writers? This book offers the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature, arguing that our notions of literary genius are implicitly shaped by and explicitly questioned in novels about novelists, a genre that has been critically underexamined.
