Reissuing works originally published between 1960 and 1995, this varied set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship. It includes topics that touch on psychology, feminist criticism, philosophy and litrerary history as well as examinations of autobiography as genre.

Originally published in 1995. V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent living in the West, has written in many forms. Through an analysis of five works by Naipaul written in different modes and periods of his life, this study posits a relationship between a cultural condition and a choice of genre and narrative, or more specifically between cultural displacement and the writing of autobiography. Examining an aspect of Naipaul s development as a post-colonial writer, this book is of interest in exploring the way that concepts of self determine the writing of texts. It considers...

Originally published in 1981. This book looks at the autobiographical work of nine twentieth-century writers Henry Adams, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Green and Adrian Stokes. The author argues that often the writer has shaped his life through his craft, coming to understand the pattern of his own existence through the formalism of language. In each case the writer stamps his personality on the work by mean of a distinctive verbal surface whose discipline enables him to evade narrow egotism and forces both reader and writer...

Originally published in 1993. This book explores the process by which individuals reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. Drawing on the lives of such notable figures as St Augustine, Helen Keller and Philip Roth as well as on the combined insights of psychology, philosophy and literary theory, the book sheds light on the intricacies and dilemmas of self-interpretation in particular and interpretive psychological enquiry more generally.

The author draws upon selected, mainly autobiographical, literary texts in order to examine concretely the process of rewriting the...

Originally published in 1990. Many post-World War I autobiographies focus on episodes of crisis. In a century torn by global strife and breakdown of cultural institutions, autobiography provides a way of recovering from crisis and restructuring reality a healing act that involves the writer in a "wrestle with words and meanings" that can be deeply regenerative. Narration can be a way of purging guilt and pain, re-centering the self, and reconnecting with community after a shattering experience has driven one into silence and isolation. This book considers the problems, such as finding...

Originally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term autobiography existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as "Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions," etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings.

The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings...

Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form and traces its historical origins and development, analyses its truth and talks about what sort of self-knowledge it...

Originally published in 1990. This uniquely fascinating study approaches the problem of autobiography from two directions: first assessing theories of the self, consciousness and language developed by both Freud and Derrida; second through the reading of the autobiographical aspects of their writings. The book begins with looking at the issue of making sense of a life by means of representation, through autobiography, within the field of psychological phenomena screen memories, mourning, obsession, hysteria, transference. Part 1 focuses on Freud s case histories and psychoanalysis being...

Originally published in 1985. This investigation of Ovid s fable takes a different tack to previous studies of the love lyric or the themes but looks at the creation of narrative strategies to explain Narcissus experience. The story has always been understood as literally impossible but invites readers to ask what is meant by the puzzling tale of deception and death.

The limits placed on the fable by the commentaries of the medieval period allow us to appreciate the narrative expansion of the fable in twelfth and thirteenth-century poetry. Themes in this book are the way the fable is...