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The Craft Of Fiction: Teaching Technique, 1850-1930, Mary Stewart Atwell

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The Craft of Fiction, 1850-1930

This dissertation considers two models of authorship active in the British nineteenth century: one that viewed the writing of fiction as the province of genius unconnected with the world of work, and another that saw it as a practice requiring a set of learned skills. This distinction carried implications of class, since writing that was understood to be work could be a product subject to marketplace exchange, and also gender, since the "hack-writing" so despised by mid-century periodical writers was often discursively feminized. Though the model that privileged genius and disregarded the labor involved in …