The Craft of Fiction: Teaching Technique,1850--1930.

详细信息   

• 作者：Atwell ; Mary Stewart.
• 学历：Ph.D.
• 年：2013
• 导师：Bailin, Miriam,eadvisorDzuback, Mary Annecommittee memberKoepnick, Lutzecommittee memberMcKelvy, Williamecommittee memberMeyer, Stevenecommittee memberSherry, Vincentecommittee member
• 毕业院校：Washington University in St. Louis
• Department：English & American Literature
• ISBN：9781303056437
• CBH：3560014
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：8887448
• Pages：181

文摘

This dissertation considers two models of authorship active in the British nineteenth century: one that viewed the writing of fiction as the province of genius unconnected with the world of work, and another that saw it as a practice requiring a set of learned skills. This distinction carried implications of class, since writing that was understood to be work could be a product subject to marketplace exchange, and also gender, since the "hack-writing" so despised by mid-century periodical writers was often discursively feminized. The first chapter of my dissertation examines the various efforts at professionalization among fiction writers active at mid-century, focusing particularly on Dickens. Dickens promoted the model of the independent and respected professional author in a number of ways, including through his involvement with the Royal Literary Fund and his co-founding, with Bulwer-Lytton, of the Guild of Literature and Art. At his journals, Household Words and All the Year Round, Dickens dictated technical standards to the writers on his payroll in a manner that has commonly been read as the exploitation of alienated labor, but can also be seen as part of a process of professionalization benefiting many writers other than Dickens himself. To embody the figure of the author that copyright reform had made possible, Dickens needed to produce a reliable product, and the craft principles he promoted helped make that product consistently appealing. Still mindful, however, of the importance of the idea of original genius, he never expressed his technical principles to the public at large. Through a reading of David Copperfield, I show that, on the contrary, he tried to make the work of writing invisible to his readers. Chapter Two focuses on the correspondence between Dickenss friend Bulwer-Lytton and his "pupil," Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The foregrounding of the specificities of technique their letters and in Braddons novel The Doctors Wife demonstrates that the erasure of the work of writing in David Copperfield was not the only option. Each of these writers established a professional identity that was deeply and publicly engaged with questions of how writing should be written and how it should be sold. However, although Bulwer-Lytton can seem surprisingly modern in his willingness to address his ideas on technique to "future students," the principles he promulgated were not transparent, nor were they universally applicable. They were formulated in a way that promised to enhance his status as one of the masters, and in so doing enforce familiar distinctions between the respectable professional novelist and the hack writer. The debate between Henry James and Walter Besant in their respective versions of "The Art of Fiction" is the centerpiece of Chapter Three. In his reply to Besant, James tried to show that Besants attempt to determine principles that would aid the aspiring writer was futile, since only a true literary artist could comprehend the intricacies of the art of fiction. In The Novel Art, McGurl argues that James was establishing a way of talking about what McGurl calls the "art-novel," a novel with a concern for aesthetics new to the English literary scene. However, the art-novel as practiced by James does not, as McGurl claims, facilitate professionalism and "brotherhood" among writers. In fact, its aim is very much in opposition to professional organizations like Besants Society of Authors&mdash；not to democratize the practice and marketing of fiction writing, but to establish it as a fine art above the understanding of all but a select few. For James, who lived on the proceeds from his fiction his entire adult life, changing the conversation to aesthetics was a convenient way of obscuring the question of whether one wrote for money and separating himself from the middle-class writers who catered to novel-hungry masses. In this context, "art" becomes just another way of saying genius. My concluding chapter is organized around two important guides to the craft of fiction published at the beginning of the twentieth century: Jamess prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels, and Arnold Bennetts How to Write a Novel. While Bennett sought to advance what he called "the democratisation of art" by promoting the craft of writing and encouraging better taste among readers, James continued to voice his skepticism about the possibility of a technical discourse that would be of use to people who werent highly gifted by nature. The disdain for Bennett among writers like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf has obscured the fact that the twentieth-century approach to the teaching of the craft of fiction is derived from his approach, and the self-help tradition that inspired it, rather than from the modernists. Abstract shortened by UMI.).