10 “Do you seriously believe in literature?” Comic Turns from Aldous Huxley to Kingsley Amis

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents VII
3. Introduction: How Literature Makes Authors 1
4. Part I Literary Authorship in History and Theory
5. 1 Towards a Literary History of Literary Authorship 19
6. 2 Authors, Works, Audiences: Conceptual Foundations 53
7. Part II Author-Making and Social Form in the Nineteenth Century
8. 3 Lost Illusions: Balzac’s Brutal Materialism 85
9. 4 Compromise Formation in the English Literary Bildungsroman 99
10. 5 The Novel of Allopoetic Deformation: Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) 115
11. 6 “Sign it like a queen”: Writing Female Authors in the Victorian Novel 127
12. 7 Starving in the Reading Room: Precarious Economies of Authorship in Late Victorian Fiction 153
13. 8 Curious Double Lives: Puzzles of Authorship in James, Kipling, and Beerbohm 173
14. Part III Modernist Author Fictions
15. 9 The Ambivalence of Promise in Arthur Machen, E. M. Forster, and Henry Green 195
16. 10 “Do you seriously believe in literature?” Comic Turns from Aldous Huxley to Kingsley Amis 213
17. 11 “Writing’s a mug’s game”: Novels of Resentment and Regeneration in the 1930s and 1940s 233
18. 12 Working Women: Figurations of Female Authorship in Postwar Britain 255
19. Part IV From Postmodernist Metafiction to Contemporary Autofiction
20. 13 The Validity of Authorship: Postwar British Metafiction from Muriel Spark to William Golding 279
21. 14 “The unreckoned consequences of art”: Authorial Realism in Munro, Carver, Roth, and Moore 301
22. 15 Authorship Horror: Stephen King’s Misery (1987) 319
23. 16 The Tremor of Genre: Making and Unmaking Writers in Suspense Fiction 331
24. 17 Economies of Authorship in Contemporary (Auto‐)Fiction: Between Expressivism and Institutionalism 347
25. Conclusion 377
26. Appendix 1: An Incomplete List of Authorship Narratives, 1800 –2022 385
27. Appendix 2: Quantitative Survey, 1800– 2022 403
28. List of Illustrations and Tables 405
29. Glossary 407
30. Acknowledgements 409
31. References 411
32. Index 447