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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 are implicitly shaped by and explicitly questioned in novels about novelists, a genre that has been critically underexamined.
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 StoriesPoverty 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 AAppendix BAppendix CIndex
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.