#it's very strange—especially in the context of lecturing people for not reading outside their wheelhouse
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As an early modernist, it's always bizarre to see so much writing advice along the lines of "I just wish more writers read broadly enough to understand the fundamental distinctiveness of original characters and story lines in fiction writing, the thing that separates true literature from all other forms of fiction writing..."
I mean, I wish people read broadly enough to understand that the value for originality as the foremost defining quality of publishable fiction is bound up in deeply modern assumptions driven by capitalism and intellectual property law, but none of us get everything we want, I guess!
...But seriously, even if you restrict yourself to English-language literature, please read some fiction written prior to 1700 before forming arguments about the fundamental nature of fictional literature through all of time and space. You don't get Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida without Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and you don't get Chaucer's Criseyde without Boccaccio's.
This isn't simply loose inspiration in the way that all things have inspirations, but active engagement with a very specific character and plot none of them had invented. Chaucer's version of Criseyde in particular is very much in dialogue with other iterations of her, and the sympathy and nuance he brings to the character really rewards familiarity with the Cressida figure as usually depicted—a familiarity he could, at the time, expect his audience to have.
That kind of intertextuality was extremely normalized at the time as a general rule, not only when it came to specific works or authors, and would be so for centuries afterwards. In fact, fiction writing involving pre-existing characters and plots was a common element of fiction written in English for far longer than capitalism has existed. We are still closer in time to when Shakespeare was writing Troilus and Cressida than he was to the medieval source of the story.
#the idea that originality of character and plot is the distinctive quality of (fictional) literature as a genre is - well.#it's one thing in pragmatic terms since we /do/ live in a world where publishing is enormously affected by ip and capitalism#but the way pragmatic realities are then integrated into theories of how art fundamentally operates without accounting for cultural norms?#it's very strange—especially in the context of lecturing people for not reading outside their wheelhouse#obviously not everyone is going to become an early modernist but some baseline acknowledgment of the effect of capitalism on literary norms#does not seem too much to ask from people making sweeping arguments about the nature of fiction writing as a medium#isabel talks#academic chatter#literature#artist: geoffrey chaucer#text: troilus and criseyde#artist: william shakespeare#text: troilus and cressida#artist: giovanni boccaccio#text: il filostrato#early modern chatter
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