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"Autobiographical fiction History and criticism."
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The Story of \Me\
Autofiction, or works in which the eponymous author appears as a fictionalized character, represents a significant trend in postwar American literature, when it proliferated to become a kind of postmodern cliché.The Story of \"Me\"charts the history and development of this genre, analyzing its narratological effects and discussing its cultural implications. By tracing autofiction's conceptual issues through case studies and an array of texts, Marjorie Worthington sheds light on a number of issues for postwar American writing: the maleness of the postmodern canon-and anxieties created by the supposed waning of male privilege-the relationship between celebrity and authorship, the influence of theory, the angst stemming from claims of the \"death of the author,\" and the rise of memoir culture.Worthington constructs and contextualizes a bridge between the French literary context, from which the term originated, and the rise of autofiction among various American literary movements, from modernism to New Criticism to New Journalism.The Story of \"Me\"demonstrates that the burgeoning of autofiction serves as a barometer of American literature, from modernist authorial effacement to postmodern literary self-consciousness.
eBook
The story of \me\ : contemporary American autofiction
\"The Story of \"Me\" shows that the burgeoning of autofiction serves as a barometer of American literature from modernist authorial effacement to postmodern literary self-consciousness\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Essays on Life Writing
Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.
Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.
The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.
eBook
Creating identity in the Victorian fictional autobiography
\"This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre's radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines \"who we really are,\" this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Autobiographies of Others
In this volume, Boldrini examines \"heterobiography\"-the first-person fictional account of a historic life. Boldrini shows that this mode is widely employed to reflect critically on the historical and philosophical understanding of the human; on individual identity; and on the power relationships that define the subject. In such texts, the grammatical first person becomes the site of an encounter, a stage where the relationships between historical, fictional and authorial subjectivities are played out and explored in the 'double I' of author and narrating historical character, of fictional narrator and historical person. Boldrini considers the ethical implications of assuming another's first-person voice, and the fraught issue of authorial responsibility. Constructions of the body are examined in relation to the material evidence of the subject's existence. Texts studied include Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Adair's The Death of the Author, Banti's Artemisia, Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografía del general Franco. Also discussed, among others: Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Tabucchi's The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, Giménez-Bartlett's Una habitación ajena (A Room of Someone Else's).
eBook
The limits of autobiography : trauma and testimony
\"An analysis of how trauma shaped innovation in autobiographical writing during the memoir boom\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
“Authentic Masks”: Narrating Jewish Refugee Transit to the Caribbean in Felicia Rosshandler’s Passing Through Havana
The flight of Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean has become a new focal point of historical scholarship. Less attention has been devoted, however, to literary representations of these journeys. Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe feature prominently, for example, in Jamaican novelist John Hearne’s Land of the Living (1961) and Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter (2002). More recently, Haitian author Louis Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017) addresses refugee journeys to Haiti that remain largely unexplored in historical scholarship. Moreover, Jewish refugees have also written fiction and poetry inspired by their experiences of flight to the Caribbean. Such works reveal the refugees’ complex responses to the colonial environments in which they found themselves. These texts suggest how the refugees’ understanding of colonial racism was informed by their own experiences of persecution while also being shaped by European colonialist discourses and preconceptions. A case in point is Felicia Rosshandler’s autobiographical novel Passing Through Havana: A Novel of a Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean (1984), which depicts her Jewish family’s flight in 1941 from Nazi-occupied Belgium to Cuba. Overlaying the refugee narrative with a narrative of adolescent sexual awakening that emphasizes the sensuality of the tropics, Rosshandler’s novel at times promotes a primitivist, exoticizing gaze. This article examines Passing Through Havana ’s intertwining of the refugee narrative with a colonialist gaze and the larger tensions that the novel highlights with regard to Jewishness and race in the Caribbean.
Journal Article
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and culture
\"One of America's leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane combine analyses of both women to explore their collaborative process and how their books reflect the authors' view of place, time, and culture, expanding the critical discussion of Wilder and Lane beyond the Little house\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Happy Hsiungs
Between 1935 and 1936, the play Lady Precious Stream was a big success as being performed and running for 1,000 nights at the Little Theatre in London. Its writer-director, Shih-I Hsiung (熊式一), was the first Chinese person to direct a West End play. Hsiung’s wife, Dymia, was also remarkable as the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English. By retrieving the lost histories of these two celebrated writers, this book considers how ideas of China and Chineseness are circulated and contested globally. Though fêted as ‘The Happy Hsiungs’, their lives ultimately highlight a bitter struggle in attempts to become modern.
eBook