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UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3m54d1q1 Author Caughey, John Sutton Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by John Sutton Caughey 2016 © Copyright by John Sutton Caughey 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks by John Sutton Caughey Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Jonathan Hamilton Grossman, Co-Chair Professor Mark J. McGurl, Co-Chair This dissertation reads the archive of literary advice texts that erupted into the world of letters beginning in the mid-1880s alongside the work of Henry James, Jack London, Arnold Bennett, and Virginia Woolf. At that moment, fiction, to adapt a phrase of Edward Gibbon, was elevated into an art and degraded into a trade. The agitated coupling of art and commerce made authorship seem available and attractive on an unprecedented scale. All manner of instructional texts, from how-to manuals to plot charts, and from author interviews to fictions about fiction making, sated this sudden explosion of interest. United by a post-Romantic faith that novelists, though born to varying degrees of talent, could be made, this enterprise mobilized emerging knowledge practices and media technologies in its effort to develop a practical science of fiction, one I dub “fictioneering.” ii My central field of study is not so much the “how-to” documents themselves as the practices they produced, the processes they allowed, and the techniques they fostered. In attending to fictioneering, I expose how the doctrine of the autonomous literary object arose as part of the formation of the discipline of English literature from a sort of sleight of hand. In the case of the novel, technique, which was first articulated as a writer’s tool, subtly morphed into an inherent feature of the text, dormant until uncovered by the skilled reader. “How to Become an Author” tells the story of an unexpected rivalry between fictioneering and the new-born science of literary criticism, a rivalry that profoundly shaped the signature techniques of both. iii The dissertation of John Sutton Caughey is approved. Stuart M. Burrows Michael A. North Mark I. Seltzer Mark J. McGurl, Committee Co-Chair Jonathan Hamilton Grossman, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv To Jessica, Emily, and Malcolm v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Art of Fictioneering ........................................................................................... 1 Part I:............................................................................................................................................. 19 Part II: Chapter One Learning Fiction by Subscription ................................................................................................. 97 Part II: Chapter Two The Making of the Self-Making Author..................................................................................... 153 Part II: Chapter Three Changing the Character of Modern Fiction ................................................................................ 202 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 263 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the course of this dissertation I have considered several bookshelves worth of advice on the art of writing. Doing so has made me particularly aware of the great fortune I have had in receiving the best. Jonathan Grossman’s advice deserves to be enshrined in a handbook, but never could be because the enthusiasm behind it would burst the binding. Mark McGurl managed to allay the doubts his own magnificent work instilled. Mark Seltzer guided me to unexpected insights while almost fooling me into thinking I had arrived at them on my own. Michael North has perfected the art of asking the single question that brings everything into question and kindly raised enough of them to keep me busy these last years and many more. Stuart Burrows made prescient suggestions that became ever more relevant as the project evolved. Chris Mott provided the bridge between thinking and doing. Many others at UCLA had a part in the making of this dissertation. Christian Reed, Cristina Griffin, Jake Lang, Leigh-Michil George, Tim Fosbury, and Jay Jin all contributed in essential ways to the actual work of writing, and many other graduate students helped in less tangible, if no less essential, ways. “How to Become an Author” benefitted enormously from the careful attentions of the Nineteenth-Century Group, the Americanist Research Colloquium, and the M/ELT group. My students helped me to take the measure the project’s concrete stakes. Deeper debts are owed to my family for their support through the years. Many thanks to my father, my mother, my brother, my sisters, to Patricia Martin, and to the Suttons for everything they have done. Emily patiently made room for this dissertation while Malcolm, whose infancy coincided with the infancy of the project, has shared his entire life with it. Both provided the clearest possible lessons about inspiration. All the advice in the world would have meant nothing if it weren’t for Jessica, who provided all the essential things that I needed to become anything. vii VITA Education M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2010 M.A., English, University of Nevada, Reno, May 2007 B.A., Magna Cum Laude, Philosophy, Bates College, May 1996 Publication “A Zombie Novel With Brains: Bringing Genre to Life in the Literature Classroom,” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 7, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2015): 1-22. Selected Conference Papers “Telling Stories, Selling Stories: The Art and Business of Authorship in Literary Handbooks,” English Department Winter Athenaeum, February 2013. “The Author’s Study: Reading the Room of One’s Own,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference, Scripps College, CA, November 2011. “Learning Fiction by Subscription,” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Scottsdale, AZ, October 2011. “Training for Authorship: How-To Handbooks and the Art of Fiction,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Annual Conference, Honolulu, HI, November 2010. “‘Let’s Write a Movie’: Constructing the Photoplay Author,” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Albuquerque, NM, October 2010. Selected Awards and Fellowships UCLA Department of English Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2014–2015 Collegium of University Teaching Fellows Award, UCLA, 2014 Dean’s Fellowship, UCLA, 2010-2011 Graduate Research Mentorship, UCLA, 2009-10 Pauley Fellowship, UCLA, 2007-8 viii Introduction The Art of Fictioneering On April 25, 1884, the novelist Walter Besant stood before the Royal Institution to deliver “The Art of Fiction,” an oddly genial polemic aimed at making his profession “the Sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry.”1 As matters presently stood, he suggested, the general public would regard any such claim as “ludicrous and even painful” (AF, p.5). Yet, for Besant, fiction was the most potent of all arts in spite of the low regard, capable of the widest reach and the deepest influence. On his view, the mis-measure of fiction proceeded from a confusion about how it was written. This misunderstanding of the craft was so widespread, he argued, that it prevailed even “among the majority of those who try their chance in the field of fiction.” Such a mistaken view held that whatever art went into novels derived from in-born traits, bolstered by intuition or perhaps, at best, “unconscious imitation.” To write a novel one merely had to “sit down and write one” (AF, p. 15). Besant, by contrast, argued that fiction was an art only insofar as its laws, methods, and rules “may be laid down and taught with as much precision as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion” (AF, p. 6). The art of fiction, in short, drew its legitimacy from a body of formal techniques and principles that could be both learned and taught, and any campaign aimed at raising the prestige of the venture must start from them. More than sixty-five years later, the scholar Mark Schorer would feel compelled to make what seems a remarkably similar claim in his “Fiction and the Analogical Matrix.” Literary criticism of the novel must begin, Schorer announces, with “the simplest assertion: fiction is a 1 Besant, The Art of Fiction (London, 1902), pp. 5-6; hereafter abbreviated AF. 1 literary art.”2 Writing at the moment when a second wave of New Criticism finally turned in earnest to fiction, Schorer defensively justifies his belated claim by admitting that a “beginning as simple as this must overcome corrupted reading habits of long standing.”3 This corruption, as Schorer makes clear in “Technique as Discovery,” an essay he published just a year prior to “Analogical Matrix,” manifests in the tendency to read as though the novel’s “content has some value in itself, as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element capable perhaps of not unattractive
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