Modernism and Autobiography

This is the first book of its kind to address modernist autobiography in a comprehensive manner.

Maria DiBattista (Edited by), Emily O. Wittman (Edited by)

9781107025226, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 September 2014

318 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

'Written in a professional way and accompanied with references from contemporary literature and photos, the work entitled: Modernism and Autobiography, published under the coordination of Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman at Cambridge University Press in 2014, is not only an interesting research for readers specialised in the investigated topic, but also an useful tool for the contemporary research and a pleasant and useful lecture for everyone who wants to know better the modern literature and to find how the autobiographical research has influenced its evolution.' Iuliu-Marius Morariu, Astra Salvensis

This volume offers sixteen 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.

Introduction Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman
Part I. Ancestries: 1. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: a nervous history Francis O'Gorman
2. The 'fascination of what I loathed': science and self in W. B. Yeats's autobiographies Rónán McDonald
3. Writing at sea: Conrad's Personal Record of 'my life', and 'my two lives' Michael Levenson
4. Two Henrys: James and Adams as autobiographers Lee Mitchell
5. Spaces of time: Virginia Woolf's life-writing Elizabeth Abel
Part II. Emerging: 6. Travel writing as modernist autobiography: Evelyn Waugh's Labels and the writing personality Jonathan Greenberg
7. Queer autobiographical masquerade: Stein, Toklas, and others Barbara Will
8. Elizabeth Bowen and modernist autobiography Allan Hepburn
9. 'Leaving the Territory': Ralph Ellison's backward glance Marc Conner
Part III. Surviving: 10. Touching subliterate lives: Indian soldiers, the Great War, and life-writing Santanu Das
11. The last of Katherine Mansfield Jay Dickson
12. T. S. Eliot's impersonal correspondence Max Saunders
13. The real Hem Maria DiBattista
Part IV. Disappearing: 14. 'Death Before the Fact': posthumous autobiography in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Smile Please Emily O. Wittman
15. Abstraction, impersonality, abstraction Robert Caserio
16. Name after name: Beckett's secret autobiography Michael Wood.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature & literary studies [D], Biography: literary [BGL]