What is an example of an author's voice (in literary terms)?

Question

What is an example of an author's voice (in literary terms)?

Answer 1

Author's Voice is the distinct manner in which certain novelists create sentences and their stories.

Read any book by Dean Koontz;  he has a very strong AV and this is primarily what sells his books. You can read a page or two and know that Koontz was the author simply by the 'voice'.

“Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.” – Dean Koontz

Answer 2

A brilliant example of 'authorial intrusion' (which I think is the literary device you're after) is in John Fowles' 'The French Lieutenant's Woman'. In this book, the author actually becomes a character in the narrative (but it is entirely fictitious). Fowles uses both authorial intrusion (or, as you say, where the "author's voice" is heard) AND a type of writing sometimes referred to as 'metafiction', in which the story is self-referential (i.e. within the story itself, the narrator acknowledges that the tale is just a piece of fiction dreamt up by the author - and thus the division between 'reality' and 'fiction' becomes blurred.)

Here is an example of authorial intrusion:

"Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass. I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little since the year of which I write..."

Here is an example of self-referential writing (in which the "author's voice" is heard):

"Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and 'voice' of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God."

These examples are both quite similar - and that is because they exemplify authorial intrusion AND self-referential writing. Sometimes the term 'authorial intrusion' is used to refer to more subtle instances of the author influencing the narrative with their thoughts/viewpoints, however strictly speaking this is not 'authorial *intrusion*.

Hope this helps/is of some interest!

Answer 3

The author's voice is the style of writing. A good example is the dialect used in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.