This innovative volume extends existing conversations on translation and modernism with an eye toward bringing renewed attention to its ethically complex, appropriative nature and the subsequent ways in which modernist translators become co-creators of the materials they translate. Wittman builds on existing work at the intersection of the two fields to offer a more dynamic, nuanced, and wider lens on translation and modernism. The book draws on scholarship from descriptive translation studies, polysystems theory, and literary translation to explore modernist translators’ appropriation of source texts and their continuous recalibrations of equivalence between source text and translation. Chapters focus on translation projects from a range of writers, including Beckett, Garnett, Lawrence, Mansfield, and Rhys, with a particular spotlight on how women’s translations and women translators’ innovations were judged more critically than those of their male counterparts. Taken together, the volume puts forth a fresh perspective on translation and modernism and of the role of the modernist translator as co-creator in the translation process. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies, modernism, reception theory, and gender studies.

In The New Midlife Self-Writing, Wittman treats recent self-writing by Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, Sarah Manguso, and Maggie Nelson, carefully situating these vital midlife works within the history of self-writing. She argues that they renew and redirect the autobiographical trajectories characteristic of earlier self-writing by switching their orientation to face the future and by celebrating midlife as a growing season, a time of Bildung. In each chapter, writer-by-writer, she demonstrates how the midlife self-writers in question trace confident and future-oriented paths through the past, rejecting triumphalism and complicating both identity and individualism, just as they refine and redefine genres. Exploring these midlife self-writers as chroniclers of Generation X's midlife in particular, Wittman coins the term "digital absence" to map their unique relationship to new forms of knowledge and knowledge gathering in an Information Age that they are both of and set apart from. She theorizes that their works share a "pedagogical style," a style characterized by clarity, exposition, and classical rhetoric, as well as a concern with the classroom, offering a warrant for reading them in pedagogical terms in concert with traditional scholarly approaches. Furthermore, Wittman presents readers with a look ahead at the future of midlife self-writing as well as self-writing overall, concluding that we might be looking at the scholarship of the future.

The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography offers a historical overview of the genre from the foundational works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau through the great autobiographies of the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras. Seventeen essays from distinguished scholars and critics explore the diverse forms, audiences, styles, and motives of life writings traditionally classified under the rubric of autobiography. Chapters are arranged in chronological order and are grouped to reflect changing views of the psychological status, representative character, and moral authority of the autobiographical text. The volume closes with a group portrait of late-modernist and contemporary autobiographies that, by blurring the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction, expand our understanding of the genre. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, the volume will appeal especially to students and teachers of non-fiction narrative, creative writing, and literature more broadly.

The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography offers a historical overview of the genre from the foundational works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau through the great autobiographies of the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras. Seventeen essays from distinguished scholars and critics explore the diverse forms, audiences, styles, and motives of life writings traditionally classified under the rubric of autobiography. Chapters are arranged in chronological order and are grouped to reflect changing views of the psychological status, representative character, and moral authority of the autobiographical text. The volume closes with a group portrait of late-modernist and contemporary autobiographies that, by blurring the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction, expand our understanding of the genre. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, the volume will appeal especially to students and teachers of non-fiction narrative, creative writing, and literature more broadly.

This volume offers seventeen original essays that attest to the extraordinary inventiveness and range of modernist autobiography. It examines the ways modernist writers chose to tell their life stories, with particular attention to forms, venues, modes of address, and degrees of truthfulness. The essays are grouped around a set of rubrics that isolate the distinctive character and shared preoccupations of modernist life-writings: questions of ancestry and tradition that foreground the modernists' troubled relation to their immediate familial as well as cultural past; their emergence as writers whose experiences found expression in untraditional and singular forms; their sense of themselves as survivors of personal and historical traumas; and their burdens as self-chroniclers of loss, especially of self-loss. It will appeal especially to scholars and students of literary modernism and English literature more generally.