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 theGuardian (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 novelHopscotch 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 r
