Literature

Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention

Paperback

Price:
$51.00/£42.00
ISBN:
Published:
Jul 14, 2014
1985
Pages:
300
Size:
7 x 10 in.
Main_subject:
Literature
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Investigating autobiographical writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston, this book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation. Further, Paul John Eakin contends, the self at the center of all autobiography is necessarily fictive. Professor Eakin shows that the autobiographical impulse is simply a special form of reflexive consciousness: from a developmental viewpoint, the autobiographical act is a mode of self-invention always practiced first in living and only eventually, and occasionally, in writing.

Originally published in 1985.

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