Literary Generations

When Is an Author?

Maria Sibylla Merian, from Metamorphosis Insectorum

Author versus Work

Are authors a useful category for understanding literary history? This may seem like a silly question. After all, we only have to walk into a chain book store to see massive portraits of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf staring down from the walls, their iconic faces serving as a shorthand for the story of literature. And so long as we’re talking about individual authors, the answer is obvious: they’re not only useful but necessary. The author’s biography is a vital ligature between the ineffable text and the flesh-and-blood world, anchoring writing in our shared history. Even a bare name seems to help us connect the work to the world, as in the case of Homer’s Iliad. (I sometimes wonder if Gawain and Pearl wouldn’t have a bigger place in English literature if we’d decided to christen their author with a more human name than “The Gawain Poet.”)

But once we talk about authors in the plural, the question becomes more difficult. That’s because the chronologies of authorial lives and literary texts often pull us in different directions. Take, for example, the 1720s. It’s the decade when Daniel Defoe published almost all of his novels—only Crusoe, his first, dates to 1719—and some of his most important political works. It’s also the decade of Henry Fielding’s first publication, The Masquerade, A Poem (1728). Although Fielding wouldn’t write his novels until later, he and Defoe, two thirds of the famous triad of The Rise of the Novel, converged in the 1720s.

But if their literary chronology united them, their lives pulled them apart: nearly half a century divided Defoe, who was born in 1660, from Fielding, who was born in 1707. If we’re looking at the timing of works, we might consider Fielding and Defoe together; if we’re thinking of the timing of lives, Defoe belongs beside his exact contemporary, the court wit Halifax, while Fielding is a near-contemporary of Samuel Johnson.

Literary history is full of cases like this. It’s especially complicated to align lives and works for late bloomers, a category of writer that

Henry Oliver

has brought to the fore on his Substack and in his recent book. Defoe, as it happens, was one of English literature’s most important late bloomers: although he was already a writer and journalist, he was 59 when he published his first novel. It’s fair to say that if he had died at 58 or earlier, like so many men and women of his age, his name would be known only to a handful of scholars.

Precocious writers also pose challenges: while not a prodigy along the lines of metaphysical wünderkind Abraham Cowley, Fielding began his publication career young, at 21. For that matter, writers who are neither precocious nor late bloomers, but simply happened to die very young or very old (provided they kept writing), trouble our sense of literary history.

One more example: 1897, the year Bram Stoker, another late bloomer, published his first novel, Dracula, at the age of 50. In that year, Thomas Hardy, 57, published the last of his novels, The Well-Beloved. This bizarre allegorical novel follows the sculptor Jocelyn Pierston over the course of forty years as he falls in love with three successive generations of women from one family, pursuing the same twenty-year-old beauty in life that he seeks to carve in stone Hardy writes,

It was the historic ingredient in this genealogical passion—if its continuity through three generations may be so described—which appealed to his perseverance at the expense of his wisdom.

It was also the year of the twenty-three-year-old Somerset Maugham’s literary debut, Liza of Lambeth, the story of an eighteen-year-old who comes to a tragic end, of youth cut short.

Two novels, then, that prompt us to reflect back on the Victorian age at its endpoint, “the Century’s corpse,” as Hardy would write, Dracula and The Well-Beloved. Both were by middle-aged authors, and both are parables of the problem of generational change, of an older generation that refuses to cede its grip and make way for the young.¹ And one novel focused on youth, that takes us insistently forward into the twentieth century, when Maugham would publish the bulk of his work: his last great novel, The Razor’s Edge, appeared in 1944. But all three were published in the same year.

Generations

So long as we’re only looking at one or a few authors, at Defoe and Fielding, or Stoker, Hardy, and Maugham, the discrepancy between life and work isn’t a problem. It’s easy to maintain a kind of double vision that simultaneously situates literature within an author’s biography and a wider cultural moment: after all, it’s how we live our own lives, treading our individual paths within a perpetually transforming landscape. But when we try to understand literary history over long spans of time and at larger scales, things get more complicated. Do we organize our analysis in terms of publication dates? Or biographically, in terms of literary generations?

As a rule, scholars choose the former. Only those working on the twentieth century use generations to discuss literary history with any regularity, because it’s only in the twentieth century that generations became a commonplace of culture, consciously embraced by writers themselves. There are a couple of exceptions: we do talk about first and second generation Romantics; in Spanish literary history, there’s the generation of 1898. But, in general, we don’t have shorthands for thinking about literary or cultural generations before the twentieth century. The Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro was typical in writing 1599, not The Generation of 1564. But if we take the biographical character of literary history seriously, there’s a case to be made for using generations to think about how styles change over time, how genres emerge and fade.

Generations, especially as they’re used in the popular media, can be a confused and confusing concept, and I don’t want to try to unravel every thread in this conceptual tangle. But, in brief, they have two components: vertical and lateral, or biological and social. The vertical dimension is the life cycle, the movement from birth to reproduction to death, and, by extension, the continual replacement of the young by the old. The lateral dimension, by contrast, reaches outward to imagine the creation of similarly aged cohorts defined by shared experiences. Both have to come together if we’re to think about culture in generational terms, but for now, I just want to consider the vertical dimension.

Vertical generations are often used to explain cultural change along evolutionary lines: there are new ideas, new styles, new sensibilities because the young continually replace the old. It’s Thomas Kuhn’s theory in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In a more agonistic formulation, it’s also at the heart of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. Up to a point, it’s embedded in our assumptions about authorship. If we think that the works of Defoe, or Fielding, or Hardy have some indelible authorial signature—if we in fact think that this signature is what gives their work value and meaning and coherence—it follows that an author’s voice has to be stable across time. The only way to really change the literary sphere, in that case, is to add or subtract writers.

It’s a plausible enough theory. But how true is it? After all, we all know that writers’ styles evolve. The Thomas Hardy of The Mayor of Casterbridge is not the Thomas Hardy of The Dynasts (and thank goodness for that). Is that evolution also a mechanism of change?

As it happens, my friend and colleague Steve Vaisey, a sociologist who works on political and religious beliefs and generational change, among other things, set out to answer that very question, together with Ted Underwood, Kevin Kiley, and Wenyi Shang. Their paper, “Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture,” is a large-scale quantitative survey using topic modeling to analyze 10,830 works of literature. As it turns out, “most change” amounts to “slightly more than half.” Authors’ development is about equally important to literary change, especially for writers early in their careers. But this is still an important result because, as the papers’ authors rightly note, “the factors that shape cohorts occupy far less than half the pages in literary history” (196).

The life cycle, the coincidence of when we happen to be born, shapes writers as it shapes us all. Our capacity for self-invention and reinvention is real, but limited. We could view this in fatalistic terms, as Thomas Hardy seems to have done, characteristically enough. In “The Superseded,” he writes,

’Tis not that we have unforetold
   The drop behind;
We feel the new must oust the old
   In every kind;
But yet we think, must we, must we,
   Too, drop behind?

But we could also see it, and I think we should, as one more point of evidence that the rhythms of biological life shape culture, binding bodies and words in an authentic unity.

1. This seems to be a preoccupation of this moment, the decade Dorian Gray and Ibsen’s The Master Builder, among others. I think it’s probably the first point when literature is beginning to reckon with the problem of an aging population—compared to our own, a very youthful population, of course, but much older than at the century’s beginning, thanks to increasing life expectancy for adults.