
- 300 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Fiction in Autobiography: Ask Mary McCarthy No Questions
- 2 Henry James and the Autobiographical Act
- 3 Jean-Paul Sartre: The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Book
- 4 Self-Invention in Autobiography: The Moment of Language
- Index