Jane Austen: inventor of the novel of manners?
In an interview, graphic novel author Alan Moore talks about Jane Austen’s place in literary history:
Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they’re about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn’t a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.
July 23rd, 2004 at 11:25 am
Right on, Alan Moore! He just got that much cooler. As a fan of fantasy, sci-fi, and comics, I can attest that a lot of mere “genre” fiction is better written and certainly more interesting than “true” lit. And since everybody knows that JA invented chicklit, I guess that makes her an author of “genre fiction”, right?