ABSTRACT
What is literary creativity? Philosophical and literary tradition holds that the following two conditions must be met: novelty and value. There is, unsurprisingly, a large amount of controversy about just how both conditions should be spelt out. Nonetheless, there is a surprising amount of agreement that both conditions are required (Attridge 2004, Boden 2004, Carroll 2003, Gaut 2003, O’Quin and Besemer 1999, Stokes 2008). Novelty is necessarily a relational term, being a matter of newness with respect to something that has gone before, whilst (literary) value is at least partly relational, concerning how we appreciate and value literature.
