This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, including Proust, Breton, Woolf and Faulkner, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

This book is the first to discover and probe in depth memory phenomena captured in literary works. Using literature as a laboratory for the workings of the mind, this comparative study of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Octavio Paz, including Proust, Breton, Woolf and Faulkner, uncovers valuable material for the classification of the memory process. Nalbantian's daring interdisciplinary work, involving literature, science, and art, forges a new model for dialogue between the disciplines.

'A rich contribution to the study of autobiography.' - James Olney Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Proust, Joyce, Woolf, with Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterised by a common aesthetics. She discovers in these writings a threshold of artistic transformation beyond the identification of biographical authenticity.