Aesthetic autobiography1994

Aesthetic Autobiography is a pathbreaking study in comparative literature which gets to the heart of what is literary at a time when the classic distinctions between literature and other forms of writing are under attack. Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography.

Selectively reviewing both the history of autobiography proper and the critical studies to date, she positions her subject in a new area of aesthetics by demonstrating the transmutation of life fact into fiction in the modern autobiographical novel.

Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, with Anais Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterized by...