okay, without looking it up...

[clauclauclaudia]

Does this usage of eponymous seem okay to you or not? Why?

[blah blah Chekhov on film] "Based on his eponymous 1891 novella, THE DUEL gives life to a classic Chekhovian tale...."

All right. Look it up if you want to, but let me know if you do.

I'm screening comments for a bit to get independent answers, but I'll unscreen them soonish. [Edit: slow unscreening now complete.]

Comments

[dot_fennel]

To expand: I googled [["based on * eponymous"]] and was like, whoa, millions of hits? But on looking at them, I realized it was, broadly speaking, a usage I see all the time, and don't remember ever looking twice at before.

The factors I mentioned *seem* to be what separate good sentences from bad in my head, but whether those guesses are right or not, it's pretty clear that the rule I pedantically want to insist on is not the rule I usually actually apply when reading.

So that's interesting!

Also, it occurs to me that changing the order would normally make it a lot harder for a writer to use "his" instead of "the". I think you'd have to find some way to stick the writer's name between the title and the pronoun, like

"THE DUEL is one of Chekhov's finest cinematic moments, based on his eponymous 1891 novella..."

I mean, even then I don't like it much stylistically, but I'm much less sure I've even run into it in the wild.