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 questioned 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.
General
Imprint: |
Taylor & Francis
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Series: |
Among the Victorians and Modernists |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
First published: |
2023 |
Authors: |
Elizabeth King
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
272 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-03-246090-1 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-03-246090-3 |
Barcode: |
9781032460901 |
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