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 Kunstlerroman

The Autobiographical Kunstlerroman

A Romantic Connection: The Child and the Poet

Tonio Kroger: 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