Self Impression

Self Impression explores the fascinating ways in which writers from the 1870s to the 1930s - including Pater, Ruskin, Proust, Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf - experimented with forms of life-writing. It proposes a new relation between autobiography and fiction in the period and a radically innovative literary history of Modernism.

Self Impression explores the fascinating ways in which writers from the 1870s to the 1930s - including Pater, Ruskin, Proust, Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf - experimented with forms of life-writing. It proposes a new relation between autobiography and fiction in the period and a radically innovative literary history of Modernism.

Part I: Modern Ironisations of Auto/Biography and the Emergence of Autobiografiction: Victorian and fin-de-siecle Precursors; 1 Im/personality: The Imaginary Portraits of Walter Pater; 2 Aesthetic Auto/biography: Ruskin and Proust; 3 Pseudonymity, Third-personality, and Anonymity as disturbances in fin-de-siecle auto/biography; 4 Autobiografiction: Stephen Reynolds and A. C. Benson; 5 Auto/biografiction: Counterfeit Lives: A Taxonomy of Displacements of Fiction towards Life-Writing; 6 Literary Impressionism and Impressionist Autobiographies: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford; Part II: Modernist Auto/biografiction; 7 Heteronymity I: Imaginary Authorship and Imaginary Autobiography: Pessoa, Joyce, Svevo; 8 Heteronymity II: Taxonomies of Fictional Creativity: Joyce (continued) and Stein; 9 Auto/biographese and Auto/biografiction in Verse: Ezra Pound and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; 10 Satirical Auto/biografiction: Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis; 11 Woolf, Bloomsbury, the 'New Biography', and the New Auto/biografiction; 12 After-Lives: Postmodern Experiments in Meta-Auto/biografiction: Sartre, Nabokov, Lessing, Byatt; Conclusion