Narratives of the Self

This book explores the many interdependencies and crossovers between living and writing, or, in more specific terms, between writers' lives on the one hand and their literary output on the other. Thematically divided into four major parts, the book focuses on different literary concerns and discusses literary works from the 17 century to the present day. The first part approaches the issue of autobiography and biography, the second part takes a close look at travel writing, while the third discusses various lives in fiction and the fourth deals with confessional writing.

Contents: Kurt Müller: Didactic Posturing: Strategies of Authorial Self-Fashioning in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography - Tomasz Niedokos: Peter Ackroyd's Biographies: The Parallel Lives of Thomas More, T.S. Eliot and the Biographer Himself? - Katarzyna Szmigiero: Two Accounts of One Life: Marya Hornbacher's Wasted and Madness in Close-up - Anna Slonina: Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road - a Real-life Story Behind Kerouac's On the Road - Maciej Adamski: Wheels within Wheels + To thine own self be true = Writing and Motoring - Pawel Schreiber: Tom Stoppard's alternative autobiography in Rock 'n' Roll - Wojciech Jasiakiewicz: Visions of Poland, Russia and Europe. «Rizpah» Charles Algernon Swinburne - Magdalena Ozarska: The Beginnings and Endings in Selected Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley - Agnieszka Malek: The Corsican as the Noble Savage in the Eyes of James Boswell - Dariusz Pestka: Making alter egos up: Flann O'Brien's narrative voices as deliberate impossibilities - Tomasz Sawczuk: «I Was Just Somebody Else, Some Stranger». Hysterical Avatars of Jack Kerouac: a Lacanian Perspective - Kamil Michta: Fictionalised Memoir: Living and Writing in J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood, Youth and Summertime - Stephen Butler: «A cheerful paper about a depressive writer's life and work» - Marta Lupa:«To suspend disbelief» Confessional Narrative in Nineteenth-Century and Postmodern Novel - Natalia Brzozowska: «I am and not: I freeze and yet am burned» - Emotional Expression and Identity in the Poetry of Elizabeth I - Monika Wludzik: Drug of Choice: Self-medication and Self-preservation in De Quincey and Andrews.