Re-update

I'm still struggling with connecting these ideas. There are enormous bodies of work on Faulkner and on form/genre. I've had a few minor breakthroughs that have petered out, but I think I'm generally drifting toward some kind of major burst of work. I'm facing some personal deadlines that are motivating me - mostly frustration that I haven't produced anything meaningful in months.

Here's where we're at: individual acts of artistic creation are always created in a particular context, or a particular conversation. There are a lot of ways of talking about this relationship between individual texts and the world of texts outside of it: all authors make decisions about how closely to follow the numerous small- and large-scale conventions of creative writing. The interesting thing is how these conventions have changed in large bursts. One such burst, one might say, came about in the invention of the thing we call a "novel." Many claim that Samuel Richardson invented the novel as we know it, with Clarissa. Defoe and Fielding helped, as did many others who created things that resembled novels, or included elements that we now recognize as typical of the novel.

An important step in the development in the novel came about around 1900, as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf helped push the novel beyond the relatively rigid constraints of Victorian fiction. Again, it is unfair to say that these important artists invented something that had not existed before: considerable ink has been spilled making conflicting claims about the origins of the "modern novel," as it has come to be called. It is convenient to point to Joyce and Woolf as the crystallization of decades of slow change in the novel form.

Another key player in the change that came about in the novel was William Faulkner, of course. Some of his work was quite original, though his originality also made him mostly unpopular.