Introduction: How Literature Makes Authors

Charles Dickens, Patricia Highsmith, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Cusk, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch, and Stephen King make strange bedfellows, but there is one thing they all have in common: they have written novels about novelists. There are now so many of these that a reviewer in the Guardian (Hill 2022) called this a “moth-eaten […] tradition” of “literary navel gazing”, asking “who on earth wants to read another one?” Even Kurt Vonnegut, who referred to an even more intimate body part in his warning against excessive self-referentiality in literature,1 is guilty as charged, having created the memorable Kilgore Trout, a writer of paperback science fiction novels whose fictional life extends across several of Vonnegut’s works.

The persistence of self-referential representations of authorship in narrative fiction, however, is not only evidence of authors’ ongoing interest in this topic. The success of those novels also bears witness to the fact that many readers share this fascination with fictional author figures. It is the more surprising, then, that this phenomenon has apparently never been comprehensively and systematically studied. The present book is an attempt to set this right. Its aim is to explore works of narrative fiction that feature writers as characters or narrators, and to suggest theoretical and historical perspectives on the representation of literary authorship in ‘author fiction’.

Authors make literature, but literature also makes authors. This is what the elusive author Morelli in Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch calls “the strange self-creation of the author through his work” (Cortázar 2014, 405). Such self-creation through the work is made explicit in narrative texts that refer to and reflect on material facts and immaterial myths of authorship. By telling stories about invented authors, actual authors invite their audiences to reconsider the meanings and values of authorship, and of literature in general. Works of author fiction question or affirm prevailing notions of literary creation and production. They engage with existing ideas and practices of literary authorship, which are social and political as well as aesthetic. Moreover, writers of author fiction may be indulging in some magical thinking about changing their own position in the aesthetic and economic networks of the literary field.

In this book, I use the term ‘author fictions’ for the abstract concepts and performative expressions of literary authorship that can be realised historically within the rhetorical conventions, social forms, and media infrastructures that govern the literary field at any given time. These are fictions in a general or philosophical sense. Works of author fiction (as a literary category) are concrete textual manifestations that draw on author fictions in the former sense, on abstract models, concepts, or figures of authorship (cf. Guttzeit 2017). Such works contribute to the generation, confirmation, intensification, modification, subversion, or transformation of these concepts – making literary history in the process.

Author characters in works of fiction, like Cortázar’s Morelli, are often more than mere fictionalised stand-ins for their actual, flesh-and-blood authors. In writing about authors and authorship, writers do not simply write about themselves. They perform certain concepts of authorship by putting ideas into practice. They select from a range of possibilities and realise some of them while ignoring or rejecting others. And they expand (or at times contract) the possible positions of authors in literature and in wider cultural and social spaces. As authorships change over time, their dynamic and conflicting shifts are not merely registered but actively shaped and reshaped in such works. From the eighteenth century onwards, scenarios of authorship in narrative fiction have been crucial for establishing moments of literary modernity, creating occasions of reflexivity and friction in which new paradigms of literary creation and creativity could and did emerge. The present book unfolds a literary history of modern literary authorship, attentive to the interfaces between changing narrative forms and genres and emerging socio-economic formations and practices of authorship. Ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction, my readings focus on the literary forms and rhetorical strategies actual authors use to negotiate the material (social) forms of authorship and changing notions of narrative authority in fiction.2

To get to the bottom of these processes and their dynamic interrelations, I adapt a set of tools from narrative theory and literary sociology, since author-making is a social as well as a textual process. The social reproduction of authorship takes place both inside and outside the literary text. In this respect, I follow Pierre Bourdieu’s lead “to abolish the singularity of the ‘creator’ in favour of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself encompassed and included as a point” (1996, xvii). Some works make these relations more explicit by ‘encompassing and including’ authors as characters or narrators.

It is in the novel, more than in any other literary genre, that the problem of literary authorship has been most fully reflected over the past three centuries. Lyric poetry rarely draws attention to the role of the poet as author or the processes of writing and publishing. Epic poems or, more recently, verse novels sometimes do.3 In drama, the epic mode of introducing a narrator as a character on the stage is a special case, and there are few plays in which literary authorship is a major theme (Goethe’s Torquato Tasso comes to mind, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, or Tim Crouch’s The Author). The ‘authorship play’ will have to wait for a different study. In narrative fiction, the often close, sometimes challenging alignment between characters, narrators, and their authors harbours an unwritten history of this aspect of literary form.4

After establishing a historical and theoretical foundation in part I, the book proceeds chronologically through three major historical periods: the Victorian age (part II), the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century (part III), and the later twentieth to early twenty-first century (part IV). The large number of texts that could potentially have been included made some hard choices necessary.5 The only legitimate apologies for my selection reside in the natural limitations of time and space, accompanied by the hope that these readings will be sufficiently representative while also opening a field for future studies.

A key inspiration for my work has been Mark McGurl’s study of the emergence of institutional creative writing programmes, The Program Era, a best-practice example of the combination of literary criticism and sociology. McGurl introduces the term “autopoetics” to describe a cultural system that turns the “reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist’” into a vital part of the modern artist’s job (2009, 48). This coinage highlights the mutual implication of personal expression and institutional formation in the very idea and practice of creative writing. It combines poetics (the making of literature) with the concept of self-creation or self-perpetuation (autopoiesis) derived from biological systems theory (Maturana/Varela 1980 and 1988). Similarly, I describe “the strange self-creation” of authors “through [their] work” (Cortázar 2014, 405), as a process of authorpoiesis. By this I mean the reflexive-performative construction of a relational space in which (both fictional and real) authors find themselves “encompassed and included” (Bourdieu 1996, xvii).

‘Self-creation’ should be understood in the objective as well as subjective sense: it can involve forms of alienation, reification, and self-loss when an authorial persona is fashioned by the pressure of external forces. In these processes, authors as well as their works and their audiences are active, purposeful agents. Writers embark on becoming authors by using autopoetic strategies in their work, devising or suggesting an authorial self; when these strategies are successful, that is when the work is perceived by audiences as indeed ‘authorpoietic’, this transforms the writer into an author as the product or by-product of the work and its reception. Both processes, textual and social, depend on and stabilise one another. These processes are always at work in literature. Works of author fiction, however, are special cases that make these processes explicit in their content and often in their form. They are also, I will argue, performative: writing and reading such works contribute to the gradual emergence of new paradigms of authorship, new ways of understanding writers as authors.

After a long fallow period, narrative theory has recently been giving more attention to authorial agency as a constant of literary communication, and to seeing narrative as “ultimately not a structure but an action, a teller using resources of narrative to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience” (Phelan 2017, x; cf. Clark/Phelan 2020). Obviously, this has not ended critical debates...