Writing life : early twentieth-century autobiographies of the artist-hero / Mhairi Pooler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pooler, Mhairi.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Autobiography--English authors.

Autobiography.

Autobiography--Authorship.

World War, 1914-1918.

Physical Description:

vi, 199 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press : The English Association, 2015.

Summary:

Writers' lives are endlessly fascinating for the reading public and literary scholars alike. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a crucial point in world and literary history. Writing Life explores how and why a select group of early twentieth-century writers, Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson, adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing. Instead of (mis)reading these autobiographies as historical documentation, Pooler examines how these authors conduct a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War. Book jacket.

Contents:

i The Historical Horizon 8

ii Creative Autobiography 15

1 The Writer Reading 22

i Tradition and Inheritance: The Künstlerroman 25

ii 'Influence (Inflowing)' 42

2 The Anxiety of Inheritance: Edmund Gosse's Father and Son 53

i Victorian and Modern 56

ii Religion and Literature 63

3 The Art of Life: Henry James's A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother 77

i Making a Scene 84

ii The Fostered Imagination 91

iii 'Convert, convert, convert!' 98

4 A Twofold Experiment with Time: Siegfried Sassoon's The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried's Journey 109

i 'Fictionalized Reality, Essayized Autobiography' 113

ii 'Nostalgic and Breezy Reminiscences' 122

iii 'England's Young Soldier-Poet' 129

5 An Investigation of Reality: Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage 140

i The Art of Fiction 144

ii Pilgrimage's Progress 151

iii Of Language, of Meaning, of Mr Henry James 161.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1781381976

9781781381977

OCLC:

910856857