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Self Impression - Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Paperback)
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Self Impression - Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Paperback)
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I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like
out of what I was.' Paul Valery, Moi. Modernism is often
characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of
auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism
and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with
questions about life-writing. Max Saunders explores the ways in
which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with
forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary,
journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction. He identifies a
wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses
the term 'autobiografiction' - discovered in a surprisingly early
essay of 1906 - to provide a fresh perspective on
turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new
literary history of Modernism. Saunders offers a taxonomy of the
extraordinary variety of experiments with life-writing,
demonstrating how they arose in the nineteenth century as the
pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the
categories of biography and autobiography, in works by authors such
as Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark Rutherford', George Gissing, and A.
C. Benson. He goes on to look at writers experimenting further with
autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism,
juxtaposing detailed and vivacious readings of key Modernist texts
by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, with explorations of the work of
other authors - including H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad,
Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis - whose experiments with
life-writing forms are no less striking. The book concludes with a
consideration of the afterlife of these fascinating experiments in
the postmodern literature of Nabokov, Lessing, and Byatt. Self
Impression sheds light on a number of significant but
under-theorized issues; the meanings of 'autobiographical', the
generic implications of literary autobiography, and the intriguing
relation between autobiography and fiction in the period.
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