Authorial Intent (post 2): Not only literary fiction, but genre fiction, like detective novels, may be “discovered” by author, rather than being intentional.

Rereading my last post, I see that I restricted what I said to literary fiction, assuming that genre fiction, in contrast, was intentional: Surely detective novels, for example, whose clues and details have to be figured out and planned in detail, are intentional.

But in restricting what I said to literary fiction, I had forgotten the detective novelists I have discussed in this blog; for example, Sue Grafton, who has explicitly said that she has a sense of “discovering” her books, which seem to have been prewritten for her.

So it is not just literary fiction for which the concept of authorial intent is problematic.