Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography by Heidi L. Pennington

Biography ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-432
Author(s):  
Anne Reus
Keyword(s):  
Fictional Autobiography

Whose life is it anyway? Practice-based research into performed fictional-autobiography and the paradox of fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
Simon Lovat
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
Fictional Autobiography

This article explores the notion of ‘self’ as it pertains to autobiographical writing, and its repercussions for the fact/fiction dichotomy inherent in autobiographical praxis. The mode of articulation is a discussion of the reception of two one-man plays: Memoires of a Confused Man (2016) and Are Strings Attached? (2017). Both plays are written and performed by this writer. Drawing on philosophical, cognitive and spiritual discourses, I show that ‘selfhood’ is not a transparent and unproblematic proposition. I then re-examine the so-called paradox of fiction. I argue that it is common experience to care about notional entities and suggest that this comes about by way of ‘transfictional disavowal’ and ‘affective metalepsis’. Finally, I offer an exemplary text, read first as ‘fiction’, and then as ‘autobiography’. I then propose a new modality of the ‘paradox of fiction’, which offers a satisfactory reading position of autobiographical writings based on a re-evaluation of ‘selfhood’.

scholarly journals Helen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. R21-R24
Author(s):  
Heleen Van Duijn
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Choral Conductor ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Fictional Autobiography

The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

scholarly journals Songlines

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon Lee Glashow
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
Richard Dawkins ◽  
Robert Axelrod ◽  
Fictional Autobiography

Jeremy Bernstein’s book A Song for Molly is a fantasy in the form of fictional autobiography from which Bernstein declines to “pick out the real parts.” Sheldon Lee Glashow, in reviewing the book, finds it to be a delightful example of episodic storytelling, as Bernstein weaves around many seminal intellectual achievements, and drops many names: Robert Axelrod, Émile Borel, Richard Dawkins…

Joining the Cultural Minority

Joanna Russ ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
Feminist Utopias ◽  
The Yellow Wallpaper ◽  
Fictional Autobiography

“Joining the Cultural Minority” examines the influence of Nabokov on Joanna’s modernist, postrealist sensibility, her “fictional autobiography” project, and her insistence on the “fictiveness of fiction.” The chapter discusses issues of agency and assimilation in her fifth novel. A “re-visioning and re-perceiving” of a work by Joanna’s friend Suzette Halden Elgin, related to Joanna’s important 1970 story “The Second Inquisition,” The Two of Us (1978) features a talented young “Trans-Temp” agent who realizes that if other women are chattels, her own, special status is an illusion. Reviews, essays, and stories discussed include “Recent Feminist Utopias”; “On the Yellow Wallpaper”; “Not for Years but for Decades”; and the engaging, juvenile “coming of age” story Kitattinny, all of which confirm a shift toward feminism and away from feminist sf.

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