Auto/Biographical Discourses Criticism, Theory, Practice

In this new critical study, Laura Marcus explores autobiography as a genre and as an organizing concept in nineteenth and twentieth century thought. Drawing on a wide range of writings, both literary and theoretical, she shows how autobiography and biography have been crucial in debates over subject and object, public and private, fact and fiction--debates now refigured in feminist theory. Autobiography has itself been perceived as an unstable and hybrid genre: it appears either as a dangerous double agent moving between these oppositions, or as a magical instrument of their reconciliation. This book explores the significance of the genre in eugenics and theories of "genius;" the "new biography" of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and others; autobiography and historical consciousness of subjectivity and genre; as well as contemporary autobiographical writings and feminist theories of life-writing.

Laura Marcus is Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.