Experiments in Life-Writing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction

   • Julia Novak

   Pages 1-36Open Access

3. (Dis)Solving the Self: Methods and Modes

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 37-37

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   2. “[A] Novel Should Be the Biography of a Man or of an Affair, and a Biography, Whether of a Man or an Affair, Should Be a Novel.” Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Experiments in Biography

      • Max Saunders

      Pages 39-59

   3. “Christ this is Getting Tedious!”: Beckettian Tone Versus Autobiographical Memory in B. S. Johnson’s Trawl

      • Andy Wimbush

      Pages 61-77

   4. “My Publisher Urged Me to Write an Autobiography”: Christine Brooke-Rose’s Experiments with Life Writing

      • Eveline Kilian

      Pages 79-102

4. Genre B(l)ending: Self, Family, and the Nation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103

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   2. “Tell[ing] One Story in Place of Another”: Journeys of Discovery in Jackie Kay’s Autobiographical Prose and Poetry

      • Pietra Palazzolo

      Pages 105-126

   3. Rewriting the Traces of the Past: Jordi Soler’s La guerra perdida and Autobiographic Metafiction

      • Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir

      Pages 127-144

   4. Real-Life Fiction, Historical Form: Peter Handke’s Storm Still

      • Vanessa Hannesschläger

      Pages 145-164

5. Intermedial Experiments in Life-Writing

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 165-165

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   2. A Family Album as Autobiography: Intermedial Readings of Lalla Romano’s Romanzo di figure

      • Antonio Lunardi

      Pages 167-190

   3. The Toy Soldier and The Three Caballeros: Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time and Auto/Biography and/as Experimental Fiction

      • María Alhambra Díaz

      Pages 191-221

6. Experimenting with Lives: Writers Reflect on Their Craft

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 223-223

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   2. “Partial” Stories: Exegesis, Eisegesis, and the Tale of Two “Failed” Biographies

      • Will Slocombe

      Pages 225-247

   3. Custom-Breaker: Writing the Life of Elizabeth Cary

      • Ursula Hurley

      Pages 249-272

   4. Choosing Between Fictions of Clara Schumann: Interview with Janice Galloway

      • Julia Novak

      Pages 273-285

7. Back Matter

   Pages 287-298

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This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story.

Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity.

The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

• Europe
• Form
• Subjectivity
• Identity
• Memoir

“The book is a welcome contribution to the field of auto/biography studies, since the range of essays allows us to see the diversity in forms and functions of experimental life writing, highlighting in particular that to draw attention to the impossibility of autobiography is only one of many possible effects. … Experiments in Life-Writing offers insightful essays and invites future research on texts that engage with central dimensions of modern life writing.” (Alexandra Effe, Biography, Vol. 42 (2), 2019)

“Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak have assembled a thought-provoking collection that succeeds in making those ‘questions about the very nature and being of verbal art’ every bit as fundamental to life-writing as to other kinds of literature.” (Patrick Hayes, European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 07, 2018)

• Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, United Kingdom

  Lucia Boldrini

• University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

  Julia Novak

Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the author of Autobiographies of Others (2012), Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (2001) and Biografie fittizie e personaggi storici (1998).

Julia Novak is a Marie Andessner Research Fellow at King’s College London, UK and the University of Salzburg, Austria, working on a project on biographical novels about historical women artists. She has written a book on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen (2007), and a book on Live Poetry (2011).

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