Title: The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity
Abstract: Writing autobiography is a complicated, often fraught activity for both writer reader. We can find many recent examples of the way such writing calls into question the author's truthfulness or their authority to present as definitive their version' of a particular event or portion of their lives. Drawing upon a wide range of late twentieth early twenty-first-century autobiographical writing, The Fiction of examines key aspects of autobiography from the interrelated perspectives of author, reader, critic scholar, to reconsider how we view this form of writing, its relationship to the way we understand construct identity. Maftei considers recent cases texts such as Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking Frey's A Million Little Pieces alongside older texts such as Proust's Search of Lost Time, Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In part, this is to emphasise that key issues reappear arise over decades centuries, that texts distanced by time can speak to each other thoughtfully poignantly.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-07-04
Language: en
Type: book
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Cited By Count: 9
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