8. Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions

Author(s):  
Laura Marcus

Few of the great modernist writers produced explicit or fully fledged autobiographies, but the expansion of the ‘life-writing’ category has made visible the prevalence of autobiographical novels, including works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. ‘Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions’ explains that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography. New genres arose that blended life-writing and fiction, such as the personal essay, the ‘imaginary portrait’, and novels which incorporated authentic letters and journal entries. Since the 1980s, it is argued, the novel has been eclipsed by autobiographical narrative, reversing the earlier sense that autobiographical writing was of secondary importance.

Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Adrian van den Hoven

*Full article is in FrenchEnglish abstract:The five lectures of La Lyre havraise (November 1932– March 1933) constitute an attempt to elucidate the techniques of the modern novel. For this, Jean-Paul Sarture considers the dis - tinction between the novel and the récit introduced by Alain and Fernandez. The lectures consider Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) by André Gide; Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley; Ulysses by James Joyce; The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando by Virginia Woolf; Men of Good Will by Jules Romains; and The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos. The analysis prefigures the techniques employed by Sartre in the novels published later in his literary career.French abstract:Les cinq conférences de La Lyre havraise (novembre 1932–mars 1933) constituent une tentative d’élucidation des techniques du roman moderne. Pour cela, Sartre se base sur les distinctions entre le roman et le récit introduites par Alain et Fernandez. Ces conférences traitent des Faux-Monnayeurs d’André Gide, de Contrepoint d’Aldous Huxley, du monologue intérieur d’Ulysse de James Joyce, des Vagues, de Mrs. Dalloway et d’Orlando de Virginia Woolf, des Hommes de bonne volonté de Jules Romains et du 42ième Parallèle de John Dos Passos. Ces analyses préfigurent les techniques employées par Jean-Paul Sartre dans ses oeuvres romanesques qu’il publiera plus tard dans sa carrière littéraire.


Author(s):  
Emily Ridge

Chapter 2 considers the emergence of the woman’s bag as a subversive emblem for female self-sufficiency from the late nineteenth century. It was an emblem taken up by a number of New Woman writers of fiction and non-fiction, from George Egerton to Nellie Bly. Giving an overview of the historical and rhetorical associations of women with baggage in the context of legal understandings of women’s property rights, the chapter also looks at fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century projections (both in literary works and satirical cartoons) of the disturbance caused by these modern women to traditional chivalry and associated fictional conventions. It asks why women’s portable property was often so pivotal in renderings of this disturbance. More specifically, it hones in on the work of one prominent modernist woman writer, Dorothy Richardson, whose use of a portable model in Pilgrimage goes hand in hand with her reinvention of the female subject. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the problems faced by women beyond the domestic paradigm, considering the woman’s bag as an object of modernist conflict in texts by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.


Author(s):  
Diane F. Gillespie

In 1939, Virginia Woolf was distracted by writing projects, relocation of living and publishing quarters in London, and another impending world war. Yet she typed on behalf of the Hogarth Press a delayed rejection letter, previously unknown and unpublished, to aspiring novelist Anne Northgrave Tibble. The advice in Woolf’s letter reveals her own definition of the novel. Tibble’s forgotten voice, in her one published novel from this period, challenges, as does Woolf, war and class hierarchies, but from a different perspective. Red-brick-educated, Tibble never forgot her rural roots in North Yorkshire and consistently identified with the working classes. If Tibble is mentioned now, it is for her life writing, including scholarly biographies and a candid three-volume autobiography.


2022 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Alexandre Gil França

Resumo: Ana Cristina Cesar, em Luvas de Pelica (1980)1, mostra-nos um tipo singular de dicção íntima em que a finalidade do segredo é desativada, e uma mistura de diário de viagem, cartas e anotações pessoais é transformada em um espaço de deriva poética, no qual a posição do sujeito torna-se matéria de literatura. Há neste texto uma outra possibilidade de entendimento do que poderíamos chamar de “âmbito íntimo”, já que aqui, a intimidade acaba ganhando um estatuto diferente daquele da clausura, característico de décadas anteriores. Sabemos que nesta obra, Katherine Mansfield e Virginia Woolf são referenciadas, mas, em que medida a obra de um outro autor moderno, James Joyce, poderia dar uma nova luz à escritura de Ana Cristina? Joyce abordou de maneira intensa a temática da intimidade em seu livro Ulysses (1922), não somente através de cartas, mas também de um fluxo de consciência, em que a matéria corporal corre “junto” ao que nos é apresentado textualmente. Levando em conta o trabalho de problematização da instância íntima realizado por Ana C., haveria em Luvas de Pelica uma espécie de tonalidade joyceana refletida em seu corpus textual? Este trabalho pretende desbravar este tema, apontando para possíveis relações entre as estratégias de escrita de Ulysses e de Luvas de Pelica, a fim de descobrir pontos em comum que possam iluminar ainda mais a poética da escritora carioca.Palavras-chave: Ana Cristina Cesar; James Joyce; Intimidade; Feminino.Abstract: Ana Cristina Cesar, in Luvas de Pelica (1980), shows us a singular type of intimate diction in which the purpose of the secret is deactivated, and a mixture of travel diary, letters and personal notes is transformed into a space of poetic drift, in which the subject’s position becomes a matter of literature. There is in this text another possibility of understanding what we could call “intimate sphere”, since here, intimacy ends up gaining a different status from that of enclosure, characteristic of previous decades. We know that in this work Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are referenced, but to what extent could the work of another modern author, James Joyce, shed new light on Ana Cristina’s writing? Joyce intensely addressed the theme of intimacy in his book Ulysses (2012), not only through letters, but also through a stream of consciousness, in which the body matter of the character runs “along” with what is presented to us textually. Taking into account Ana C.’s problematization of the intimate instance, would there be in Luvas de Pelica a kind of Joycean tone reflected in her textual corpus? This paper intends to explore this theme, pointing to possible relationships between the writing strategies of Ulysses and Luvas de Pelica, in order to discover common points that can further illuminate the poetics of the writer from Rio de Janeiro.Keywords: Ana Cristina Cesar; James Joyce; Intimacy; Feminine.


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