Modernism and Autobiography

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).

• Introduction Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman; Part I. Ancestries: 1. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: a nervous history Francis O'Gorman; 2. The 'fascination of what I loathed': science and self in W. B. Yeats's autobiographies Rónán McDonald; 3. Writing at sea: Conrad's Personal Record of 'my life', and 'my two lives' Michael Levenson; 4. Two Henrys: James and Adams as autobiographers Lee Mitchell; 5. Spaces of time: Virginia Woolf's life-writing Elizabeth Abel; Part II. Emerging: 6. Travel writing as modernist autobiography: Evelyn Waugh's Labels and the writing personality Jonathan Greenberg; 7. Queer autobiographical masquerade: Stein, Toklas, and others Barbara Will; 8. Elizabeth Bowen and modernist autobiography Allan Hepburn; 9. 'Leaving the Territory': Ralph Ellison's backward glance Marc Conner; Part III. Surviving: 10. Touching subliterate lives: Indian soldiers, the Great War, and life-writing Santanu Das; 11. The last of Katherine Mansfield Jay Dickson; 12. T. S. Eliot's impersonal correspondence Max Saunders; 13. The real Hem Maria DiBattista; Part IV. Disappearing: 14. 'Death Before the Fact': posthumous autobiography in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Smile Please Emily O. Wittman; 15. Abstraction, impersonality, abstraction Robert Caserio; 16. Name after name: Beckett's secret autobiography Michael Wood.

'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