{"id":161,"date":"2006-12-04T20:40:48","date_gmt":"2006-12-05T03:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gen-o.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/04\/bibliographies-in-novels\/"},"modified":"2006-12-04T20:40:48","modified_gmt":"2006-12-05T03:40:48","slug":"bibliographies-in-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/04\/bibliographies-in-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"Bibliographies in novels?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Times has <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/12\/05\/books\/05bibl.html\">an interesting story<\/a> about how some recent novels by authors including Martin Amis, Norman Mailer, and William Vollmann contain bibliographies.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIt\u2019s terribly off-putting,\u201d said James Wood, the literary critic for The New Republic. \u201cIt would be very odd if Thomas Hardy had put at the end of all his books, \u2018I\u2019m thankful to the Dorset County Chronicle for dialect books from the 18th century.\u2019 We expect authors to do that work, and I don\u2019t see why we should praise them for that work. And I don\u2019t see why they should praise themselves for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Traditionally confined to works of nonfiction, the bibliography has lately been creeping into novels, rankling critics who call it a pretentious extension of the acknowledgments page, which began appearing more than a decade ago and was roundly derided as the tacky literary equivalent of the Oscar speech. Purists contend that novelists have always done research, particularly in books like \u201cMadame Bovary\u201d that were inspired by real-life events, yet never felt a bibliography was necessary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I recently read a wonderful bibliography in <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.joshuaprager.com\/\">Joshua Prager&#8217;s<\/a> <em>The Echoing Green<\/em>, but I think bibliographies for works of fiction should not be included in the novels themselves, but would certainly be apprpriate for, say, the author&#8217;s website.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Times has an interesting story about how some recent novels by authors including Martin Amis, Norman Mailer, and William Vollmann contain bibliographies. \u201cIt\u2019s terribly off-putting,\u201d said James Wood, the literary critic for The New Republic. \u201cIt would be very odd if Thomas Hardy had put at the end of all his books, \u2018I\u2019m thankful [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}