Auto-poetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-century British and American Fiction

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Darby Lewes
Lexington Books, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 239 pages
The nineteenth-century Kunstlerroman self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction and in doing so, tends toward irony and self-reflection, and prefigures postmodernism. A work of art written about an artist creating a work of art is, in a sense, a novel in which the author is a character. The essays in this collection examine the work of major nineteenth century authors that attempted to merge fiction and reality into a unified whole. These novels paved the way for postmodernists who would use the artist-novel to self-conciously focus on the genre's particular conventions, to parody those conventions in order to accentuate the work's fictionality, and to expose the oppositions between fiction and reality. This collection thus reveals not only material concerns, but the underlying anxieties, drives, and joys, which are so profoundly linked to the creative process."

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Contents

V
1
VII
13
IX
37
X
51
XII
63
XIII
65
XIV
73
XV
91
XX
139
XXI
151
XXII
163
XXIII
173
XXIV
175
XXV
185
XXVI
193
XXVII
201

XVI
99
XVII
111
XVIII
127
XIX
137
XXIX
213
XXX
221
XXXI
235

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About the author (2006)

Darby Lewes is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

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