Cambridge University Press Modernism and Autobiography

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. Review '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 Book Description This is the first book of its kind to address modernist autobiography in a comprehensive manner. About the Author Maria DiBattista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She has written extensively on modern literature and film, and her books include First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction; Fast Talking Dames, a study of American film comedy of the thirties and forties; Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography; and Novel Characters: A Genealogy.Emily O. Wittman, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, has published widely on literary modernism, translation studies, and autobiography. She is co-editor (with Maria DiBattista) of The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-translator (with Chet Wiener) of Félix Guattari's Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985 (2009).