The Novelist in the Novel

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

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