Author Fictions : Narrative Representations of Literary Authorship Since 1800 / Ingo Berensmeyer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berensmeyer, Ingo, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors in literature.

Authorship in literature.

Fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (516 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston, Massachusetts : De Gruyter, [2023]

Summary:

Fictional novelists and other author characters have been a staple of novels and stories from the early nineteenth century onwards. What is it that attracts authors to representing their own kind in fiction? Author Fictions addresses this question from a theoretical and historical perspective. Narrative representations of literary authorship not only reflect the aesthetic convictions and social conditions of their actual authors or their time; they also take an active part in negotiating and shaping these conditions. The book unfolds the history of such 'author fictions' in European and North American texts since the early nineteenth century as a literary history of literary authorship, ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction. It combines rhetorical and sociological approaches to answer the question how literature makes authors. Identifying 'author fictions' as narratives that address the fragile material conditions of literary creation in the actual and symbolic economies of production, Ingo Berensmeyer explores how these texts elaborate and manipulate concepts and models of authorship. This book will be relevant to English, American and comparative literary studies and to anyone interested in the topic of literary authorship.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Introduction: How Literature Makes Authors

Part I Literary Authorship in History and Theory

1 Towards a Literary History of Literary Authorship

2 Authors, Works, Audiences: Conceptual Foundations

Part II Author-Making and Social Form in the Nineteenth Century

3 Lost Illusions: Balzac's Brutal Materialism

4 Compromise Formation in the English Literary Bildungsroman

5 The Novel of Allopoetic Deformation: Herman Melville's Pierre (1852)

6 "Sign it like a queen": Writing Female Authors in the Victorian Novel

7 Starving in the Reading Room: Precarious Economies of Authorship in Late Victorian Fiction

8 Curious Double Lives: Puzzles of Authorship in James, Kipling, and Beerbohm

Part III Modernist Author Fictions

9 The Ambivalence of Promise in Arthur Machen, E. M. Forster, and Henry Green

10 "Do you seriously believe in literature?" Comic Turns from Aldous Huxley to Kingsley Amis

11 "Writing's a mug's game": Novels of Resentment and Regeneration in the 1930s and 1940s

12 Working Women: Figurations of Female Authorship in Postwar Britain

Part IV From Postmodernist Metafiction to Contemporary Autofiction

13 The Validity of Authorship: Postwar British Metafiction from Muriel Spark to William Golding

14 "The unreckoned consequences of art": Authorial Realism in Munro, Carver, Roth, and Moore

15 Authorship Horror: Stephen King's Misery (1987)

16 The Tremor of Genre: Making and Unmaking Writers in Suspense Fiction

17 Economies of Authorship in Contemporary (Auto‐)Fiction: Between Expressivism and Institutionalism

Conclusion

Appendix 1: An Incomplete List of Authorship Narratives, 1800 -2022

Appendix 2: Quantitative Survey, 1800- 2022

List of Illustrations and Tables

Glossary

Acknowledgements

References

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

3-11-105616-3