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Wikipedia

Novelist

A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.

Description

Novelists come from a variety of backgrounds and social classes, and frequently this shapes the content of their works. Public reception of a novelist's work, the literary criticism commenting on it, and the novelists' incorporation of their own experiences into works and characters can lead to the author's personal life and identity being associated with a novel's fictional content. For this reason, the environment within which a novelist works and the reception of their novels by both the public and publishers can be influenced by their demographics or identity; important among these culturally constructed identities are gender, sexual identity, social class, race or ethnicity, nationality, religion, and an association with place. Similarly, some novelists have creative identities derived from their focus on different genres of fiction, such as crime, romance or historical novels.

While many novelists compose fiction to satisfy personal desires, novelists and commentators often ascribe a particular social responsibility or role to novel writers. Many authors use such moral imperatives to justify different approaches to novel writing, including activism or different approaches to representing reality "truthfully."

Etymology

Novelist is a term derivative from the term "novel" describing the "writer of novels." The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes other definitions of novelist, first appearing in the 16th and 17th centuries to refer to either "An innovator (in thought or belief); someone who introduces something new or who favours novelty" or "An inexperienced person; a novice."[1] However, the OED attributes the primary contemporary meaning of "a writer of novels" as first appearing in the 1633 book "East-India Colation" by C. Farewell citing the passage "It beeing a pleasant observation (at a distance) to note the order of their Coaches and Carriages..As if (presented to a Novelist) it had bin the spoyles of a Tryumph leading Captive, or a preparation to some sad Execution"[1] According to the Google Ngrams, the term novelist first appears in the Google Books database in 1521.[2]

Process, publication and profession

 
William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable typewriter in his office at Rowan Oak, which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum

The difference between professional and amateur novelists often is the author's ability to publish. Many people take up novel writing as a hobby, but the difficulties of completing large scale fictional works of quality prevent the completion of novels. Once authors have completed a novel, they often will try to publish it. The publishing industry requires novels to have accessible profitable markets, thus many novelists will self-publish to circumvent the editorial control of publishers. Self-publishing has long been an option for writers, with vanity presses printing bound books for a fee paid by the writer. In these settings, unlike the more traditional publishing industry, activities usually reserved for a publishing house, like the distribution and promotion of the book, become the author's responsibility. The rise of the Internet and electronic books has made self publishing far less expensive and a realistic way for authors to realize income.

Novelists apply a number of different methods to writing their novels, relying on a variety of approaches to inspire creativity.[3] Some communities actively encourage amateurs to practice writing novels to develop these unique practices, that vary from author to author. For example, the internet-based group, National Novel Writing Month, encourages people to write 50,000-word novels in the month of November, to give novelists practice completing such works. In the 2010 event, over 200,000 people took part – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words.[4]

Age and experience

Novelists don't usually publish their first novels until later in life. However, many novelists begin writing at a young age. For example, Iain Banks (1954-2013) began writing at eleven, and at sixteen completed his first novel, "The Hungarian Lift-Jet", about international arms dealers, "in pencil in a larger-than-foolscap log book".[5] However, he was thirty before he published his first novel, the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984. The success of this novel enabled Banks to become a full-time novelist. Often an important writers' juvenilia, even if not published, is prized by scholars because it provides insight into an author's biography and approach to writing; for example, the Brontë family's juvenilia that depicts their imaginary world of Gondal, currently in the British Library, has provided important information on their development as writers.[6][7][8]

Occasionally, novelists publish as early as their teens. For example, Patrick O'Brian published his first novel, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard, at the age of 15, which brought him considerable critical attention.[9] Similarly, Barbara Newhall Follett's The House Without Windows, was accepted and published in 1927 when she was 13 by the Knopf publishing house and earned critical acclaim from the New York Times, the Saturday Review, and H. L. Mencken.[10] Occasionally, these works will achieve popular success as well. For example, though Christopher Paolini's Eragon (published at age 15) was not a great critical success, its popularity among readers placed it on the New York Times Children's Books Best Seller list for 121 weeks.[11]

First-time novelists of any age often are unable to have their works published, because of a number of reasons reflecting the inexperience of the author and the economic realities of publishers. Often authors must find advocates in the publishing industry, usually literary agents, to successfully publish their debut novels.[12] Sometimes new novelists will self-publish, because publishing houses will not risk the capital needed to market books by an unknown author to the public.[13][14]

Responding to the difficulty of successfully writing and publishing first novels, especially at a young age, there are a number of awards for young and first time novelists to highlight exceptional works from new and/or young authors (for examples see Category:Literary awards honouring young writers and Category:First book awards).

 
Novelist James Patterson, one of the most monetarily successful contemporary novelists, who made $70 million in 2010

Income

 
Novelist Shawn Wong, at work on his first novel which was published in 1979.

In contemporary British and American publishing markets, most authors receive only a small monetary advance before publication of their debut novel; in the rare exceptions when a large print run and high volume of sales are anticipated, the advance can be larger.[15] However, once an author has established themselves in print, some authors can make steady income as long as they remain productive as writers. Additionally, many novelists, even published ones, will take on outside work, such as teaching creative writing in academic institutions, or leave novel writing as a secondary hobby.[16][17]

 
Author J. K. Rowling reads from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone at the Easter Egg Roll at White House. Screenshot taken from official White House video.

Few novelists become literary celebrities or become very wealthy from the sale of their novels alone. Often those authors who are wealthy and successful will produce extremely popular genre fiction. Examples include authors like James Patterson, who was the highest paid author in 2010, making 70 million dollars, topping both other novelists and authors of non-fiction.[18] Other famous literary millionaires include popular successes like J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, Dan Brown author of The Da Vinci Code, historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer.

Personal experience

"[the novelist's] honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania [...]
The novelist is the sole master of his work. He is his work."

Milan Kundera[19]

The personal experiences of the novelist will often shape what they write and how readers and critics will interpret their novels. Literary reception has long relied on practices of reading literature through biographical criticism, in which the author's life is presumed to have influence on the topical and thematic concerns of works.[20][21] Some veins of criticism use this information about the novelist to derive an understanding of the novelist's intentions within his work. However, postmodern literary critics often denounce such an approach; the most notable of these critiques comes from Roland Barthes who argues in his essay "Death of the Author" that the author no longer should dictate the reception and meaning derived from their work.

Other, theoretical approaches to literary criticism attempt to explore the author's unintentional influence over their work; methods like psychoanalytic theory or cultural studies, presume that the work produced by a novelist represents fundamental parts of the author's identity. Milan Kundera describes the tensions between the novelist's own identity and the work that the author produces in his essay in The New Yorker titled "What is a novelist?"; he says that the novelist's "honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania [...]The work is not simply everything a novelist writes-notebooks, diaries, articles. It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project[...]The novelist is the sole master of his work. He is his work."[19] The close intimacy of identity with the novelist's work ensures that particular elements, whether for class, gender, sexuality, nationality, race, or place-based identity, will influence the reception of their work.

Socio-economic class

Historically, because of the amount of leisure time and education required to write novels, most novelists have come from the upper or the educated middle classes. However, working men and women began publishing novels in the twentieth century. This includes in Britain Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933), from America B. Traven's, The Death Ship (1926) and Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth (1929) and from the Soviet Union Nikolay Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932). Later, in 1950s Britain, came a group of writers known as the "Angry young men," which included the novelists Alan Sillitoe and Kingsley Amis, who came from the working class and who wrote about working class culture.[22][23]

Some novelists deliberately write for a working class audience for political ends, profiling "the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda".[24] Such literature, sometimes called proletarian literature, maybe associated with the political agendas of the Communist party or left wing sympathizers, and seen as a "device of revolution".[25] However, the British tradition of working class literature, unlike the Russian and American, was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others.[26]

National or place-based identity

Novelists are often classified by their national affiliation, suggesting that novels take on a particular character based on the national identity of the authors. In some literature, national identity shapes the self-definition of many novelists. For example, in American literature, many novelists set out to create the "Great American Novel", or a novel that defines the American experience in their time. Other novelists engage politically or socially with the identity of other members of their nationality, and thus help define that national identity. For instance, critic Nicola Minott-Ahl describes Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris directly helping in the creation of French political and social identity in mid-nineteenth century France.[27]

Some novelists become intimately linked with a particular place or geographic region and therefore receive a place-based identity. In his discussion of the history of the association of particular novelists with place in British literature, critic D. C. D. Pocock, described the sense of place not developing in that canon until a century after the novel form first solidified at the beginning of the 19th century.[28] Often such British regional literature captures the social and local character of a particular region in Britain, focussing on specific features, such as dialect, customs, history, and landscape (also called local colour): "Such a locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial."[29] Thomas Hardy's (1840-1928) novels can be described as regional because of the way he makes use of these elements in relation to a part of the West of England, that he names Wessex. Other British writers that have been characterized as regional novelists, are the Brontë sisters, and writers like Mary Webb (1881-1927), Margiad Evans (1909–58) and Geraint Goodwin (1903–42), who are associate with the Welsh border region. George Eliot (1801–86) on the other hand is particularly associated with the rural English Midlands, whereas Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) is the novelist of the Potteries in Staffordshire, or the "Five Towns", (actually six) that now make-up Stoke-on-Trent. Similarly, novelist and poet Walter Scott's (1771-1832) contribution in creating a unified identity for Scotland and were some of the most popular in all of Europe during the subsequent century. Scott's novels were influential in recreating a Scottish identity that the upper-class British society could embrace.

 
The Scott Monument on Edinburgh's Princes Street.

In American fiction, the concept of American literary regionalism ensures that many genres of novel associated with particular regions often define the reception of the novelists. For example, in writing Western novels, Zane Grey has been described as a "place-defining novelist", credited for defining the western frontier in America consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century while becoming linked as an individual to his depiction of that space.[30]

Similarly, novelist such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor are often describe as writing within a particular tradition of Southern literature, in which subject matter relevant to the South is associated with their own identities as authors. For example, William Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County,[31] which is based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.[32] In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction. The conservative culture in the South has also produced a strong focus by novelists from there on the significance of family, religion, community, the use of the Southern dialect, along with a strong sense of place.[33] The South's troubled history with racial issues has also continually concerned its novelists.[34]

In Latin America a literary movement called Criollismo or costumbrismo was active from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, which is considered equivalent to American literary regionalism. It used a realist style to portray the scenes, language, customs and manners of the country the writer was from, especially the lower and peasant classes, criollismo led to an original literature based on the continent's natural elements, mostly epic and foundational. It was strongly influenced by the wars of independence from Spain and also denotes how each country in its own way defines criollo, which in Latin America refers to locally-born people of Spanish ancestry.[35]

Gender and sexuality

Novelists often will be assessed in contemporary criticism based on their gender or treatment of gender. Largely, this has to do with the impacts of cultural expectations of gender on the literary market, readership and authorship.[36][37] Literary criticism, especially since the rise of feminist theory, pays attention to how women, historically, have experienced a very different set of writing expectations based on their gender; for example, the editors of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English point out: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men."[37] It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender: her position as a woman within the literary marketplace. However, the publishing market's orientation to favor the primary reading audience of women may increasingly skew the market towards female novelists; for this reason, novelist Teddy Wayne argued in a 2012 Salon article titled "The agony of the male novelist" that midlist male novelists are less likely to find success than midlist female novelist, even though men tend to dominate "literary fiction" spaces.[17]

The position of women in the literary marketplace can change public conversation about novelists and their place within popular culture, leading to debates over sexism. For example, in 2013, American female novelist Amanda Filipacchi wrote a New York Times editorial challenging Wikipedia's categorization of American female novelists within a distinct category, which precipitated a significant amount of press coverage describing that Wikipedia's approach to categorization as sexism. For her, the public representation of women novelists within another category marginalizes and defines women novelists like herself outside of a field of "American novelists" dominated by men.[38] However, other commentators, discussing the controversy also note that by removing such categories as "Women novelist" or "Lesbian writer" from the description of gendered or sexual minorities, the discover-ability of those authors plummet for other people who share that identity.[39]

Similarly, because of the conversations brought by feminism, examinations of masculine subjects and an author's performance of "maleness" are a new and increasingly prominent approach critical studies of novels.[40][41] For example, some academics studying Victorian fiction spend considerable time examining how masculinity shapes and effects the works, because of its prominence within fiction from the Victorian period.[42]

Genre

Traditionally, the publishing industry has distinguished between "literary fiction", works lauded as achieving greater literary merit, and "genre fiction", novels written within the expectations of genres and published as consumer products.[43] Thus, many novelists become slotted as writers of one or the other.[43] Novelist Kim Wright, however, notes that both publishers and traditional literary novelist are turning towards genre fiction because of their potential for financial success and their increasingly positive reception amongst critics.[43] Wright gives examples of authors like Justin Cronin, Tom Perrotta and Colson Whitehead all making that transition.[43]

However, publishing genre novels does not always allow novelist to continue writing outside the genre or within their own interests. In describing the place within the industry, novelist Kim Wright says that many authors, especially authors who usually write literary fiction, worry about "the danger that genre is a cul-de-sac" where publishers will only publish similar genre fiction from that author because of reader expectations,"and that once a writer turns into it, he’ll never get out."[43] Similarly, very few authors start in genre fiction and move to more "literary" publications; Wright describes novelists like Stephen King as the exception rather than the norm.[43] Other critics and writers defending the merits of genre fiction often point towards King as an example of bridging the gap between popular genres and literary merit.[44][45]

Role and objective

Both literary critics and novelists question what role novelists play in society and within art. For example, Eudora Welty writing in 1965 for in her essay "Must the Novelist Crusade?" draws a distinction between novelists who report reality by "taking life as it already exists, not to report it, but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader" and journalists, whose role is to act as "crusaders" advocating for particular positions, and using their craft as a political tool.[46] Similarly, writing in the 1950s, Ralph Ellison in his essay "Society, Morality, and the Novel", sees the novelist as needing to "re-create reality in the forms which his personal vision assumes as it plays and struggles with the vivid illusory "eidetic-like" imagery left in the mind's eye by the process of social change."[47] However, Ellison also describes novelists of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, not taking full advantage of the moral weight and influence available to novelists, pointing to Mark Twain and Herman Melville as better examples.[47] A number of such essays, such as literary critic Frank Norris's "Responsibilities of a Novelist", highlight such moral and ethical justifications for their approach to both writing novels and criticizing them.[48]

When defining her description of the role of the modernist novelist in the essay "Modern Fiction", Virginia Woolf argues for a representation of life not interested in the exhaustive specific details represented in realism in favor of representing a "myriad of impressions" created in experience life.[49] Her definition made in this essay, and developed in others, helped define the literary movement of modernist literature. She argues that the novelist should represent "not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; [rather] life is luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the conscious to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?"[49]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "novelist, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press. December 2013. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
  2. ^ "Google Ngrams "Novelist" 1680-2014". Retrieved February 11, 2014.
  3. ^ Alter, Alexandra (2009-11-13). "How to Write a Great Novel". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2014-02-15.
  4. ^ Grant, Lindsey (December 1, 2010). "The Office of Letters and Light Blog – The Great NaNoWriMo Stats Party". Blog.lettersandlight.org. Retrieved November 29, 2011.
  5. ^ "Doing the Business: Iain Banks", The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 1999. [1]
  6. ^ Bernard, Robert; Bernard, Louise, eds. (2007). A Brontë Encyclopedia. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 126–127. ISBN 9780470765784.
  7. ^ Brontë, Emily Jane (1938). Helen Brown and Joan Mott (ed.). Gondal Poems. Oxford: The Shakespeare Head Press. pp. 5–8.
  8. ^ The Brontës' secret science fiction stories, British Library, 11 May 2011
  9. ^ King, Dean (2000). Patrick O'Brian:A life revealed. London: Hodder & Stoughton. p. 50. ISBN 0-340-79255-8.
  10. ^ Paul Collins (December 2010). "Vanishing Act". Lapham's Quarterly. from the original on 1 January 2011. Retrieved January 2, 2011.
  11. ^ "New York Times Best Seller List". The New York Times. 2008-01-06.
  12. ^ Woodroof, Martha (October 8, 2013). "First Novels: The Romance Of Agents". Monkey See. NPR. Retrieved October 9, 2013.
  13. ^ . The Independent. 2008-01-04. Archived from the original on June 6, 2008. Retrieved 2011-05-23.
  14. ^ Kapur, Niraj (26 January 2007). "How to sell your debut novel | Books | guardian.co.uk". The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-23.
  15. ^ Kellaway, Kate (25 March 2007). "Kate Kellaway: That difficult first novel | Books |". The Observer. Retrieved 2011-05-23.
  16. ^ St. John Mandel, Emily (October 6, 2009). "Working the Double Shift". The Millions. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
  17. ^ a b Wayne, Teddy (Jan 18, 2012). "The agony of the male novelist". Salon. Retrieved 2014-02-19.
  18. ^ Smillie, Dirk (2010-08-19). "The Highest-Paid Authors". Forbes.
  19. ^ a b Kundera, Milan (October 9, 2006). "What is a Novelist?". The New Yorker (Life and Letters Section) - Subscriber Only. Retrieved January 8, 2014.
  20. ^ "Biographical Criticism", Writing essays about literature: a guide and style sheet (2004), Kelley Griffith, University of North Carolina at Greensborough, Wadsworth Publishing Company, pages 177-178, 400
  21. ^ Benson, Jackson J. (1989) "Steinbeck: A Defense of Biographical Criticism" College Literature 16(29): pp. 107-116, page 108
  22. ^ Bruce Weber (26 April 2010). "Alan Sillitoe, 'Angry' British Author, Dies at 82". New York Times. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  23. ^ "Sir Kingsley Amis". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 19 October 2013. Retrieved 5 Feb 2014.
  24. ^ J. A. Cuddon; A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism. (London: Penguin Books, 1999) p. 703.
  25. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica."Novel." Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2013.<https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel>.
  26. ^ Ian Hayward, Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to Trainspotting. (London: Northcote House, 1997), pp. 1-3
  27. ^ Minott-Ahl, Nicola (2012). "Nation/Building: Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris; and the Novelist as Post-Revolutionary Historian". Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 10 (2): 251–271. doi:10.1353/pan.2012.0024. S2CID 145170286.
  28. ^ Pocock, D. C. D. (1981-01-01). "Place and the Novelist". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 6 (3): 337–347. doi:10.2307/622292. ISSN 0020-2754. JSTOR 622292.
  29. ^ J.A Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p.560.
  30. ^ Blake, Kevin S. (April 1995). "Zane Grey and Images of the American West". Geographical Review. 85 (2): 202–216. doi:10.2307/216063. hdl:2097/4213. JSTOR 216063.
  31. ^ The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949: Biography Nobelprize.org.
  32. ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p.346.
  33. ^ Kate Cochran, review of Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West by Robert H. Brinkmeyer. College Literature Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 169-171.
  34. ^ Fred Hobson. But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative, Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
  35. ^ Criollismo www.memoriachilena.cl Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos Copyright 2013© MEMORIA CHILENA ®. Todos los Derechos Reservados May 16, 2009 Retrieved September 04, 2013 (in Spanish)
  36. ^ Murfin, Ross C.; Smith, Johanna M. (1996), Murfin, Ross C. (ed.), "Feminist and Gender Criticism and Heart of Darkness", Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, London: Macmillan Education UK, pp. 148–184, doi:10.1007/978-1-349-14016-9_5, ISBN 978-1-349-14016-9, retrieved 2021-10-07
  37. ^ a b Blain, Virginia; Isobel Grundy; Patricia Clements, eds. (1990). The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. pp. viii–ix. ISBN 9780300048544.
  38. ^ Neary, Lynn (April 29, 2013). "What's In A Category? 'Women Novelists' Sparks Wiki-Controversy". NPR.
  39. ^ S.E. Smith (April 26, 2013). "Is Wikipedia's "American Women Novelists" Category Horribly Sexist? Some people seem to thinks so". XO Jane. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
  40. ^ Mallett, Phillip, ed. (2015). The Victorian Novel and Masculinity. doi:10.1057/9781137491541. ISBN 978-1-349-32313-5.
  41. ^ Hobbs, Alex (2013). "Masculinity Studies and Literature". Literature Compass. 10 (4): 383–395. doi:10.1111/lic3.12057. ISSN 1741-4113.
  42. ^ Dowling, Andrew (2001). Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature. Ashgate Press. ISBN 9780754603801.
  43. ^ a b c d e f Wright, Kim (September 2, 2011). "Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?". The Millions. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
  44. ^ Nelson, Erik (7 July 2012). "Stephen King: You can be popular and good". Salon. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
  45. ^ Jacobs, Alan (24 July 2012). "A Defense of Stephen King, Master of the Decisive Moment". The Atlantic. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
  46. ^ Welty, Eudora (1965) [1965]. "Must the Novelist Crusade?". PBS. Retrieved January 7, 2014.
  47. ^ a b Ellison, Ralph (2003) [1957]. "Society, Morality and the Novel"". In John F. Callahan (ed.). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. The Modern Library. pp. 698–729.
  48. ^ Davies, Jude (20 October 2001). "The Responsibilities of the Novelist". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
  49. ^ a b Woolf, Virginia (2004-06-01). "Modern Fiction" (text). The Common Reader. EBooks @ Adelaide. Retrieved 2014-03-26.

Works cited

  • Kundera, Milan (October 9, 2006). "What is a Novelist?". The New Yorker (Life and Letters Section): 40.
  • O'Conner, Flannery. "Novelist and Believer". CatholicCulture.org.

novelist, novellist, redirects, here, english, grime, racehorse, novellist, horse, 2013, video, game, novelist, author, writer, novels, though, often, novelists, also, write, other, genres, both, fiction, fiction, some, novelists, professional, novelists, thus. Novellist redirects here For the English grime MC see Novelist MC For the racehorse see Novellist horse For the 2013 video game see The Novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non fiction Some novelists are professional novelists thus make a living writing novels and other fiction while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published but once published they often continue to be published although very few become literary celebrities thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work Contents 1 Description 2 Etymology 3 Process publication and profession 3 1 Age and experience 3 2 Income 4 Personal experience 4 1 Socio economic class 4 2 National or place based identity 4 3 Gender and sexuality 5 Genre 6 Role and objective 7 See also 8 References 8 1 Works citedDescription EditNovelists come from a variety of backgrounds and social classes and frequently this shapes the content of their works Public reception of a novelist s work the literary criticism commenting on it and the novelists incorporation of their own experiences into works and characters can lead to the author s personal life and identity being associated with a novel s fictional content For this reason the environment within which a novelist works and the reception of their novels by both the public and publishers can be influenced by their demographics or identity important among these culturally constructed identities are gender sexual identity social class race or ethnicity nationality religion and an association with place Similarly some novelists have creative identities derived from their focus on different genres of fiction such as crime romance or historical novels While many novelists compose fiction to satisfy personal desires novelists and commentators often ascribe a particular social responsibility or role to novel writers Many authors use such moral imperatives to justify different approaches to novel writing including activism or different approaches to representing reality truthfully Etymology EditSee also Novel Etymology Novelist is a term derivative from the term novel describing the writer of novels The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes other definitions of novelist first appearing in the 16th and 17th centuries to refer to either An innovator in thought or belief someone who introduces something new or who favours novelty or An inexperienced person a novice 1 However the OED attributes the primary contemporary meaning of a writer of novels as first appearing in the 1633 book East India Colation by C Farewell citing the passage It beeing a pleasant observation at a distance to note the order of their Coaches and Carriages As if presented to a Novelist it had bin the spoyles of a Tryumph leading Captive or a preparation to some sad Execution 1 According to the Google Ngrams the term novelist first appears in the Google Books database in 1521 2 Process publication and profession EditFurther information Self publishing and Author Relationship between author and publisher William Faulkner s Underwood Universal Portable typewriter in his office at Rowan Oak which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum The difference between professional and amateur novelists often is the author s ability to publish Many people take up novel writing as a hobby but the difficulties of completing large scale fictional works of quality prevent the completion of novels Once authors have completed a novel they often will try to publish it The publishing industry requires novels to have accessible profitable markets thus many novelists will self publish to circumvent the editorial control of publishers Self publishing has long been an option for writers with vanity presses printing bound books for a fee paid by the writer In these settings unlike the more traditional publishing industry activities usually reserved for a publishing house like the distribution and promotion of the book become the author s responsibility The rise of the Internet and electronic books has made self publishing far less expensive and a realistic way for authors to realize income Novelists apply a number of different methods to writing their novels relying on a variety of approaches to inspire creativity 3 Some communities actively encourage amateurs to practice writing novels to develop these unique practices that vary from author to author For example the internet based group National Novel Writing Month encourages people to write 50 000 word novels in the month of November to give novelists practice completing such works In the 2010 event over 200 000 people took part writing a total of over 2 8 billion words 4 Age and experience Edit Further information debut novel and juvenilia Novelists don t usually publish their first novels until later in life However many novelists begin writing at a young age For example Iain Banks 1954 2013 began writing at eleven and at sixteen completed his first novel The Hungarian Lift Jet about international arms dealers in pencil in a larger than foolscap log book 5 However he was thirty before he published his first novel the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984 The success of this novel enabled Banks to become a full time novelist Often an important writers juvenilia even if not published is prized by scholars because it provides insight into an author s biography and approach to writing for example the Bronte family s juvenilia that depicts their imaginary world of Gondal currently in the British Library has provided important information on their development as writers 6 7 8 Occasionally novelists publish as early as their teens For example Patrick O Brian published his first novel Caesar The Life Story of a Panda Leopard at the age of 15 which brought him considerable critical attention 9 Similarly Barbara Newhall Follett s The House Without Windows was accepted and published in 1927 when she was 13 by the Knopf publishing house and earned critical acclaim from the New York Times the Saturday Review and H L Mencken 10 Occasionally these works will achieve popular success as well For example though Christopher Paolini s Eragon published at age 15 was not a great critical success its popularity among readers placed it on the New York Times Children s Books Best Seller list for 121 weeks 11 First time novelists of any age often are unable to have their works published because of a number of reasons reflecting the inexperience of the author and the economic realities of publishers Often authors must find advocates in the publishing industry usually literary agents to successfully publish their debut novels 12 Sometimes new novelists will self publish because publishing houses will not risk the capital needed to market books by an unknown author to the public 13 14 Responding to the difficulty of successfully writing and publishing first novels especially at a young age there are a number of awards for young and first time novelists to highlight exceptional works from new and or young authors for examples see Category Literary awards honouring young writers and Category First book awards Novelist James Patterson one of the most monetarily successful contemporary novelists who made 70 million in 2010 Income Edit Novelist Shawn Wong at work on his first novel which was published in 1979 In contemporary British and American publishing markets most authors receive only a small monetary advance before publication of their debut novel in the rare exceptions when a large print run and high volume of sales are anticipated the advance can be larger 15 However once an author has established themselves in print some authors can make steady income as long as they remain productive as writers Additionally many novelists even published ones will take on outside work such as teaching creative writing in academic institutions or leave novel writing as a secondary hobby 16 17 Author J K Rowling reads from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer s Stone at the Easter Egg Roll at White House Screenshot taken from official White House video Few novelists become literary celebrities or become very wealthy from the sale of their novels alone Often those authors who are wealthy and successful will produce extremely popular genre fiction Examples include authors like James Patterson who was the highest paid author in 2010 making 70 million dollars topping both other novelists and authors of non fiction 18 Other famous literary millionaires include popular successes like J K Rowling author of the Harry Potter series Dan Brown author of The Da Vinci Code historical novelist Bernard Cornwell and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer Personal experience EditFurther information Biography in literature Authorial intent autobiographical novel and Psychoanalytic theory the novelist s honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania The novelist is the sole master of his work He is his work Milan Kundera 19 The personal experiences of the novelist will often shape what they write and how readers and critics will interpret their novels Literary reception has long relied on practices of reading literature through biographical criticism in which the author s life is presumed to have influence on the topical and thematic concerns of works 20 21 Some veins of criticism use this information about the novelist to derive an understanding of the novelist s intentions within his work However postmodern literary critics often denounce such an approach the most notable of these critiques comes from Roland Barthes who argues in his essay Death of the Author that the author no longer should dictate the reception and meaning derived from their work Other theoretical approaches to literary criticism attempt to explore the author s unintentional influence over their work methods like psychoanalytic theory or cultural studies presume that the work produced by a novelist represents fundamental parts of the author s identity Milan Kundera describes the tensions between the novelist s own identity and the work that the author produces in his essay in The New Yorker titled What is a novelist he says that the novelist s honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania The work is not simply everything a novelist writes notebooks diaries articles It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project The novelist is the sole master of his work He is his work 19 The close intimacy of identity with the novelist s work ensures that particular elements whether for class gender sexuality nationality race or place based identity will influence the reception of their work Socio economic class Edit Further information Social novel and Proletarian literature Historically because of the amount of leisure time and education required to write novels most novelists have come from the upper or the educated middle classes However working men and women began publishing novels in the twentieth century This includes in Britain Walter Greenwood s Love on the Dole 1933 from America B Traven s The Death Ship 1926 and Agnes Smedley Daughter of Earth 1929 and from the Soviet Union Nikolay Ostrovsky s How the Steel Was Tempered 1932 Later in 1950s Britain came a group of writers known as the Angry young men which included the novelists Alan Sillitoe and Kingsley Amis who came from the working class and who wrote about working class culture 22 23 Some novelists deliberately write for a working class audience for political ends profiling the working classes and working class life perhaps with the intention of making propaganda 24 Such literature sometimes called proletarian literature maybe associated with the political agendas of the Communist party or left wing sympathizers and seen as a device of revolution 25 However the British tradition of working class literature unlike the Russian and American was not especially inspired by the Communist Party but had its roots in the Chartist movement and socialism amongst others 26 National or place based identity Edit See also National literature Novelists are often classified by their national affiliation suggesting that novels take on a particular character based on the national identity of the authors In some literature national identity shapes the self definition of many novelists For example in American literature many novelists set out to create the Great American Novel or a novel that defines the American experience in their time Other novelists engage politically or socially with the identity of other members of their nationality and thus help define that national identity For instance critic Nicola Minott Ahl describes Victor Hugo s Notre Dame de Paris directly helping in the creation of French political and social identity in mid nineteenth century France 27 Some novelists become intimately linked with a particular place or geographic region and therefore receive a place based identity In his discussion of the history of the association of particular novelists with place in British literature critic D C D Pocock described the sense of place not developing in that canon until a century after the novel form first solidified at the beginning of the 19th century 28 Often such British regional literature captures the social and local character of a particular region in Britain focussing on specific features such as dialect customs history and landscape also called local colour Such a locale is likely to be rural and or provincial 29 Thomas Hardy s 1840 1928 novels can be described as regional because of the way he makes use of these elements in relation to a part of the West of England that he names Wessex Other British writers that have been characterized as regional novelists are the Bronte sisters and writers like Mary Webb 1881 1927 Margiad Evans 1909 58 and Geraint Goodwin 1903 42 who are associate with the Welsh border region George Eliot 1801 86 on the other hand is particularly associated with the rural English Midlands whereas Arnold Bennett 1867 1931 is the novelist of the Potteries in Staffordshire or the Five Towns actually six that now make up Stoke on Trent Similarly novelist and poet Walter Scott s 1771 1832 contribution in creating a unified identity for Scotland and were some of the most popular in all of Europe during the subsequent century Scott s novels were influential in recreating a Scottish identity that the upper class British society could embrace The Scott Monument on Edinburgh s Princes Street In American fiction the concept of American literary regionalism ensures that many genres of novel associated with particular regions often define the reception of the novelists For example in writing Western novels Zane Grey has been described as a place defining novelist credited for defining the western frontier in America consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century while becoming linked as an individual to his depiction of that space 30 Similarly novelist such as Mark Twain William Faulkner Eudora Welty and Flannery O Connor are often describe as writing within a particular tradition of Southern literature in which subject matter relevant to the South is associated with their own identities as authors For example William Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County 31 which is based on and nearly geographically identical to Lafayette County of which his hometown of Oxford Mississippi 32 In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to slavery the American Civil War and Reconstruction The conservative culture in the South has also produced a strong focus by novelists from there on the significance of family religion community the use of the Southern dialect along with a strong sense of place 33 The South s troubled history with racial issues has also continually concerned its novelists 34 In Latin America a literary movement called Criollismo or costumbrismo was active from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century which is considered equivalent to American literary regionalism It used a realist style to portray the scenes language customs and manners of the country the writer was from especially the lower and peasant classes criollismo led to an original literature based on the continent s natural elements mostly epic and foundational It was strongly influenced by the wars of independence from Spain and also denotes how each country in its own way defines criollo which in Latin America refers to locally born people of Spanish ancestry 35 Gender and sexuality Edit Further information Feminist literary criticism and Women s writing in English Novelists often will be assessed in contemporary criticism based on their gender or treatment of gender Largely this has to do with the impacts of cultural expectations of gender on the literary market readership and authorship 36 37 Literary criticism especially since the rise of feminist theory pays attention to how women historically have experienced a very different set of writing expectations based on their gender for example the editors of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English point out Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men 37 It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author but of her gender her position as a woman within the literary marketplace However the publishing market s orientation to favor the primary reading audience of women may increasingly skew the market towards female novelists for this reason novelist Teddy Wayne argued in a 2012 Salon article titled The agony of the male novelist that midlist male novelists are less likely to find success than midlist female novelist even though men tend to dominate literary fiction spaces 17 The position of women in the literary marketplace can change public conversation about novelists and their place within popular culture leading to debates over sexism For example in 2013 American female novelist Amanda Filipacchi wrote a New York Times editorial challenging Wikipedia s categorization of American female novelists within a distinct category which precipitated a significant amount of press coverage describing that Wikipedia s approach to categorization as sexism For her the public representation of women novelists within another category marginalizes and defines women novelists like herself outside of a field of American novelists dominated by men 38 However other commentators discussing the controversy also note that by removing such categories as Women novelist or Lesbian writer from the description of gendered or sexual minorities the discover ability of those authors plummet for other people who share that identity 39 Similarly because of the conversations brought by feminism examinations of masculine subjects and an author s performance of maleness are a new and increasingly prominent approach critical studies of novels 40 41 For example some academics studying Victorian fiction spend considerable time examining how masculinity shapes and effects the works because of its prominence within fiction from the Victorian period 42 Genre EditFurther information literary merit literary fiction and genre fiction Traditionally the publishing industry has distinguished between literary fiction works lauded as achieving greater literary merit and genre fiction novels written within the expectations of genres and published as consumer products 43 Thus many novelists become slotted as writers of one or the other 43 Novelist Kim Wright however notes that both publishers and traditional literary novelist are turning towards genre fiction because of their potential for financial success and their increasingly positive reception amongst critics 43 Wright gives examples of authors like Justin Cronin Tom Perrotta and Colson Whitehead all making that transition 43 However publishing genre novels does not always allow novelist to continue writing outside the genre or within their own interests In describing the place within the industry novelist Kim Wright says that many authors especially authors who usually write literary fiction worry about the danger that genre is a cul de sac where publishers will only publish similar genre fiction from that author because of reader expectations and that once a writer turns into it he ll never get out 43 Similarly very few authors start in genre fiction and move to more literary publications Wright describes novelists like Stephen King as the exception rather than the norm 43 Other critics and writers defending the merits of genre fiction often point towards King as an example of bridging the gap between popular genres and literary merit 44 45 Role and objective EditSee also Art manifesto Both literary critics and novelists question what role novelists play in society and within art For example Eudora Welty writing in 1965 for in her essay Must the Novelist Crusade draws a distinction between novelists who report reality by taking life as it already exists not to report it but to make an object toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader and journalists whose role is to act as crusaders advocating for particular positions and using their craft as a political tool 46 Similarly writing in the 1950s Ralph Ellison in his essay Society Morality and the Novel sees the novelist as needing to re create reality in the forms which his personal vision assumes as it plays and struggles with the vivid illusory eidetic like imagery left in the mind s eye by the process of social change 47 However Ellison also describes novelists of the Lost Generation like Ernest Hemingway not taking full advantage of the moral weight and influence available to novelists pointing to Mark Twain and Herman Melville as better examples 47 A number of such essays such as literary critic Frank Norris s Responsibilities of a Novelist highlight such moral and ethical justifications for their approach to both writing novels and criticizing them 48 When defining her description of the role of the modernist novelist in the essay Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf argues for a representation of life not interested in the exhaustive specific details represented in realism in favor of representing a myriad of impressions created in experience life 49 Her definition made in this essay and developed in others helped define the literary movement of modernist literature She argues that the novelist should represent not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged rather life is luminous halo a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the conscious to the end Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit whatever aberration or complexity it may display with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible 49 See also Edit Novels portal Children s literature portalAuthor Category Novelists a category containing all Wikipedia articles about novelists Imagination List of novelists by genre List of novelists by nationality Narrative StorytellingReferences Edit a b novelist n OED Online Oxford University Press December 2013 Retrieved 11 February 2014 Google Ngrams Novelist 1680 2014 Retrieved February 11 2014 Alter Alexandra 2009 11 13 How to Write a Great Novel Wall Street Journal ISSN 0099 9660 Retrieved 2014 02 15 Grant Lindsey December 1 2010 The Office of Letters and Light Blog The Great NaNoWriMo Stats Party Blog lettersandlight org Retrieved November 29 2011 Doing the Business Iain Banks The Guardian Saturday 7 August 1999 1 Bernard Robert Bernard Louise eds 2007 A Bronte Encyclopedia Oxford Blackwell pp 126 127 ISBN 9780470765784 Bronte Emily Jane 1938 Helen Brown and Joan Mott ed Gondal Poems Oxford The Shakespeare Head Press pp 5 8 The Brontes secret science fiction stories British Library 11 May 2011 King Dean 2000 Patrick O Brian A life revealed London Hodder amp Stoughton p 50 ISBN 0 340 79255 8 Paul Collins December 2010 Vanishing Act Lapham s Quarterly Archived from the original on 1 January 2011 Retrieved January 2 2011 New York Times Best Seller List The New York Times 2008 01 06 Woodroof Martha October 8 2013 First Novels The Romance Of Agents Monkey See NPR Retrieved October 9 2013 The Big Question What should you do if you want to get your first novel published Features Books The Independent 2008 01 04 Archived from the original on June 6 2008 Retrieved 2011 05 23 Kapur Niraj 26 January 2007 How to sell your debut novel Books guardian co uk The Guardian Retrieved 2011 05 23 Kellaway Kate 25 March 2007 Kate Kellaway That difficult first novel Books The Observer Retrieved 2011 05 23 St John Mandel Emily October 6 2009 Working the Double Shift The Millions Retrieved February 15 2014 a b Wayne Teddy Jan 18 2012 The agony of the male novelist Salon Retrieved 2014 02 19 Smillie Dirk 2010 08 19 The Highest Paid Authors Forbes a b Kundera Milan October 9 2006 What is a Novelist The New Yorker Life and Letters Section Subscriber Only Retrieved January 8 2014 Biographical Criticism Writing essays about literature a guide and style sheet 2004 Kelley Griffith University of North Carolina at Greensborough Wadsworth Publishing Company pages 177 178 400 Benson Jackson J 1989 Steinbeck A Defense of Biographical Criticism College Literature 16 29 pp 107 116 page 108 Bruce Weber 26 April 2010 Alan Sillitoe Angry British Author Dies at 82 New York Times Retrieved 5 June 2013 Sir Kingsley Amis Encyclopaedia Britannica Online 19 October 2013 Retrieved 5 Feb 2014 J A Cuddon A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Criticism London Penguin Books 1999 p 703 Encyclopaedia Britannica Novel Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc 2013 Web 13 Apr 2013 lt https www britannica com EBchecked topic 421071 novel gt Ian Hayward Working Class Fiction from Chartism toTrainspotting London Northcote House 1997 pp 1 3 Minott Ahl Nicola 2012 Nation Building Hugo s Notre Dame de Paris and the Novelist as Post Revolutionary Historian Partial Answers Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 10 2 251 271 doi 10 1353 pan 2012 0024 S2CID 145170286 Pocock D C D 1981 01 01 Place and the Novelist Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6 3 337 347 doi 10 2307 622292 ISSN 0020 2754 JSTOR 622292 J A Cuddon A Dictionary of Literary Terms Harmondsworth Penguin 1984 p 560 Blake Kevin S April 1995 Zane Grey and Images of the American West Geographical Review 85 2 202 216 doi 10 2307 216063 hdl 2097 4213 JSTOR 216063 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 Biography Nobelprize org The Oxford Companion to English Literature ed Margaret Drabble Oxford Oxford University Press 1996 p 346 Kate Cochran review of Remapping Southern Literature Contemporary Southern Writers and the West by Robert H Brinkmeyer College Literature Vol 29 No 2 Spring 2002 pp 169 171 Fred Hobson But Now I See The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative Louisiana State University Press 1999 Criollismo www memoriachilena cl Direccion de Bibliotecas Archivos y Museos Copyright 2013 c MEMORIA CHILENA Todos los Derechos Reservados May 16 2009 Retrieved September 04 2013 in Spanish Murfin Ross C Smith Johanna M 1996 Murfin Ross C ed Feminist and Gender Criticism and Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism London Macmillan Education UK pp 148 184 doi 10 1007 978 1 349 14016 9 5 ISBN 978 1 349 14016 9 retrieved 2021 10 07 a b Blain Virginia Isobel Grundy Patricia Clements eds 1990 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English New Haven and London Yale University Press pp viii ix ISBN 9780300048544 Neary Lynn April 29 2013 What s In A Category Women Novelists Sparks Wiki Controversy NPR S E Smith April 26 2013 Is Wikipedia s American Women Novelists Category Horribly Sexist Some people seem to thinks so XO Jane Retrieved February 8 2013 Mallett Phillip ed 2015 The Victorian Novel and Masculinity doi 10 1057 9781137491541 ISBN 978 1 349 32313 5 Hobbs Alex 2013 Masculinity Studies and Literature Literature Compass 10 4 383 395 doi 10 1111 lic3 12057 ISSN 1741 4113 Dowling Andrew 2001 Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature Ashgate Press ISBN 9780754603801 a b c d e f Wright Kim September 2 2011 Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre The Millions Retrieved February 15 2014 Nelson Erik 7 July 2012 Stephen King You can be popular and good Salon Retrieved 11 April 2013 Jacobs Alan 24 July 2012 A Defense of Stephen King Master of the Decisive Moment The Atlantic Retrieved 11 April 2013 Welty Eudora 1965 1965 Must the Novelist Crusade PBS Retrieved January 7 2014 a b Ellison Ralph 2003 1957 Society Morality and the Novel In John F Callahan ed The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison The Modern Library pp 698 729 Davies Jude 20 October 2001 The Responsibilities of the Novelist The Literary Encyclopedia Retrieved 8 February 2014 a b Woolf Virginia 2004 06 01 Modern Fiction text The Common Reader EBooks Adelaide Retrieved 2014 03 26 Works cited Edit Kundera Milan October 9 2006 What is a Novelist The New Yorker Life and Letters Section 40 O Conner Flannery Novelist and Believer CatholicCulture org Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Novelist amp oldid 1131292904, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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