Table Of ContentP A L G R A V E STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING
LUCIA BOLDRINI
JULIA NOVAK
EXPERIMENTS IN
LIFE-WRITING
Intersections of Auto/
Biography and Fiction
SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT AND MAX SAUNDERS
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
Series Editors
Clare Brant
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
Max Saunders
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with an
emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but acces-
sible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on con-
necting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series
aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars
and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects
and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative
risks with potent materials.
The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect the academic,
public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic
tradition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond
traditional territories—for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
It also aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest
(such as food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing schol-
arship can engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the
political engagement of life writing especially in relation to human rights,
migration, trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes.
The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is
understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing dig-
ital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on
the subject, and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the
world relevance of life writing.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/15200
Lucia Boldrini · Julia Novak
Editors
Experiments in
Life-Writing
Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction
Editors
Lucia Boldrini Julia Novak
Department of English University of Salzburg
and Comparative Literature Salzburg, Austria
Goldsmiths College
University of London
London, UK
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
ISBN 978-3-319-55413-6 ISBN 978-3-319-55414-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55414-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936913
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. This book is an open access publication.
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see license information in the chapter.
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A
cknowledgements
A volume like this is a work of extensive collaboration, and we would
like to express our gratitude to the numerous people who have made
it possible. Thanks are due, first of all, to all our contributors for their
unwavering commitment to this project. We would like to thank the
series editors: Clare Brant, for her advice and encouragement, and
Max Saunders, who has also contributed a chapter to this volume. For her
substantial assistance with the proof-reading and final preparation of the
manuscript, we thank Brittain Bright. For helping with the transcription
of the interview with Janice Galloway, thanks are due to Brigitte Grahsl.
Special thanks go to our colleagues Sandra Mayer and Ian Macgregor
Morris for their helpful suggestions and feedback on the introduction
and to Dieter Cerny and Florian Mussgnug for providing last-minute
scans of images from Lalla Romano’s books. We gratefully acknowledge
the estate of Lalla Romano and the Italian Literary Agency for granting
permission to use the images.
Maria Macdonald and Richard Bolley, and Megha Agarwal and Beth
Guilding are owed thanks for their practical support with the organisa-
tion of our June 2015 conference on “Biography and/as Experimental
Fiction,” from which the idea for this book arose. We are much obliged
to the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the English and Comparative
Literature Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, which pro-
vided the financial support that made the conference possible.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Throughout the preparation of this volume, our thoughts kept going
to our recently deceased colleagues Bart Moore-Gilbert and Werner
Huber, two life-writing scholars who were an inspiration.
Last but not least, we would like to thank our partners, Sergio and
Jakob, for putting up with our workaholic ways.
c
ontents
1 Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction 1
Julia Novak
Part I (Dis)Solving the Self: Methods and Modes
2 “[A] Novel Should Be the Biography of a Man
or of an Affair, and a Biography, Whether of a Man
or an Affair, Should Be a Novel.” Ford Madox
Ford and Modernist Experiments in Biography 39
Max Saunders
3 “Christ this is Getting Tedious!”: Beckettian
Tone Versus Autobiographical Memory
in B. S. Johnson’s Trawl 61
Andy Wimbush
4 “My Publisher Urged Me to Write an
Autobiography”: Christine Brooke-Rose’s
Experiments with Life Writing 79
Eveline Kilian
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Genre B(l)ending: Self, Family, and the Nation
5 “Tell[ing] One Story in Place of Another”:
Journeys of Discovery in Jackie Kay’s
Autobiographical Prose and Poetry 105
Pietra Palazzolo
6 Rewriting the Traces of the Past: Jordi Soler’s
La guerra perdida and Autobiographic Metafiction 127
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir
7 Real-Life Fiction, Historical Form: Peter Handke’s
Storm Still 145
Vanessa Hannesschläger
Part III Intermedial Experiments in Life-Writing
8 A Family Album as Autobiography: Intermedial
Readings of Lalla Romano’s Romanzo di figure 167
Antonio Lunardi
9 The Toy Soldier and The Three Caballeros:
Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time and
Auto/Biography and/as Experimental Fiction 191
María Alhambra Díaz
Part IV Experimenting with Lives: Writers Reflect
on Their Craft
10 “Partial” Stories: Exegesis, Eisegesis, and the Tale
of Two “Failed” Biographies 225
Will Slocombe
11 Custom-Breaker: Writing the Life of Elizabeth Cary 249
Ursula Hurley
CONTENTS ix
12 Choosing Between Fictions of Clara Schumann:
Interview with Janice Galloway 273
Julia Novak
Index 287
