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This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.NovelsWikipedia:WikiProject NovelsTemplate:WikiProject Novelsnovel articles
This is a confusing, poorly-sourced article. That the "fragmentary novel" is a thing isn't really controversial, I think- "fragmentary novel" currently gives about 221,000 Google hits- but this article's definition of the term is idiosyncratic, and seems to rely very heavily on one cited source (http://www.fractiousfiction.com/), which is written by a "jazz critic and music historian" (Ted Gioia), rather than a subject-matter expert. It doesn't do a very good job of distinguishing a "fragmentary novel" from a "short story cycle" or a "composite novel," or even an "epistolary novel." The list featured in the article seems to be based on Gioia's list, and it idiosyncratically includes not just novels that deliberately employ a fragmented structure, but also works usually described as "short story cycles" (eg Winesburg, Ohio or Go Down, Moses (book)) novels that are fragmentary by dint of their unfinished-ness (eg The Last Tycoon, Answered Prayers, The Original of Laura), fix-ups of previously-published stories (eg The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The Martian Chronicles), and collections of short stories that are not normally described as novels at all (eg In Our Time (short story collection), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Demon Box (book) (about which the author said "It isn't a novel"), or The Illustrated Man, which has only the flimsiest frame story). Maybe some of these qualify as "fragmentary novels," maybe they don't, but none of them are cited. The body text needs to be expanded and better-cited, but it'd probably be best to just wipe the "examples" list, and only add to it works which can be shown to have been described as "fragmentary novels" by multiple RSes. Yspaddadenpenkawr (talk) 23:46, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
