Hard-to-Google Lit. Crit. Queries...

[steepholm]

Is there a general term for novels (or other fictions) that contain/mention themselves? I mean, the novel is called The Book of Glum, and it's about someone who turns out to be writing or reading a book called The Book of Glum, or we're at least given to know that this is a world where The Book of Glum already exists?

Also, is there decent existing discussion (in journals or elsewhere) of this phenomenon?

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Laurie King's The Art of Detection might fit somewhere around the foothills here. In that book, "The Art of Detection" is a manuscript allegedly by Doyle, narrated by Holmes himself, 100 pages, which is embedded in full in King's novel. Whether that's 100 yellowed typewriter ms pages, or 100 pages in King's novel, I'm too lazy to look up.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to remember whether "The Art of Detection" is canonical - it does sound vaguely familiar. Did ACD's Holmes' ever write a monograph with that title?

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Several screens into a Bing search, this came up, in a different context.

Where does the name ‘The Art of Detection’ come from?
The name comes from Sherlock Holmes himself. In The Adventure of the Abbey Grange Sherlock Holmes was complaining to Watson that he, Watson, in his attempt to please readers, was not paying sufficient attention to the finer points of his art, that is, the art that Sherlock Holmes practises as a detective. As remedy he proposes to spend his retirement years ‘in the composition of a textbook which shall focus the whole Art of Detection into one volume.’
http://psh2.wordpress.com/

However, the manuscript in King's novel was a short story or memoir which read like m/m fan fic, with little if any detection in it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Slightly beside the point but drifting along joyously...

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Sayers lets Lord Peter Wimsey (refer to) his epoch-making work "The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum” or "101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death” though it never appears to get ready, perhaps due to an overload of material. We also don´t see him working on it, easily distracted as he is by collecting incunabila.

There is also a "Manual of Detection" by one Jedediah Berry and all of this invariably makes me think of Chesterton´s "Club of Men Misunderstood", those "Four Faultless Felones" of his as opposed to O´Brien´s "Third Policeman".

Isn´t Bulgakov´s Master writing The Book, too? Like Dostoyevsky his Doppelgänger and Faust but I´ll leave it there...I think. Endless as it is!

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Casaubon was stalling on his book. Roquentin formally gave up his, perhaps due to a bad sinus allergy attack.