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Presentation of the book Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature by Max Saunders (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with questions about life-writing.

In Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature, Max Saunders explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction.

He identifies a wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses the term 'autobiografiction' - discovered in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 - to provide a fresh perspective on turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new literary history of Modernism.

Saunders offers a taxonomy of the extraordinary variety of experiments with life-writing, demonstrating how they arose in the nineteenth century as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography, in works by authors such as Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark Rutherford', George Gissing, and A. C. Benson. He goes on to look at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism, juxtaposing detailed and vivacious readings of key Modernist texts by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, with explorations of the work of other authors - including H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis - whose experiments with life-writing forms are no less striking. The book concludes with a consideration of the afterlife of these fascinating experiments in the postmodern literature of Nabokov, Lessing, and Byatt.

Max Saunders is Professor of English at King's College London and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research and the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP, 1996)

Per sapere di più: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/maxsaunders/

Vita Fortunati (Università di Bologna) and Elena Lamberti (Università di Bologna) will introduce the author.

Organised in collaboration with the Associazione Culturale Italo Britannica

Wednesday 23 June 2010 - ore 17.00 - Sala della Giunta, Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne, Via Cartoleria 5, 40124 Bologna