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Helen Keller tells us about Anne Sullivan Macy, the woman who opened the world for her. Although the book was intended as a biography, it is also autobiographical in part since the lives of the author and subject were so closely intertwined for many years.

Not a chronological biography but an account of what Kahlil Gibran was about and what he believed in as told by his closest friend and personal secretary who knew him during the last seven years of his life. Includes some of his paintings and etchings and snippets of his poems and writings. Records the personal history of the Lebanese poet and painter, vividly recreating his personality and philosophy. Author of this book, Barbara Young, was an art and literary critic at the New York Times early in the 20th century, and a poet. She met Kahlil Gibran at a reading of his work The Prophet and became his personal secretary and confidante from 1925 until his death in 1931.

This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors'position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status.

A memoir by the New York Times–bestselling author and longtime chronicler of America's wealthy elite. Born in Connecticut in 1929 and educated at Williams College, Stephen Birmingham went on to create a literary niche with his numerous nonfiction works about New York's—and the nation's—upper class, particularly focusing on Jewish, African American, and Irish communities, as well as old-money WASPs. He also drew on his “intimate knowledge of the private lives of the rich and famous” to write bestselling works of fiction such as The Auerbach Will (The New York Times Book Review). In this book, Birmingham's attention is turned to his own life, both personal and professional, allowing us to learn about the man who created such compelling portraits of glittering parties, exclusive addresses, and, in some cases, rags-to-riches sagas that epitomize the American dream—and the American struggle. In the end, his story is as fascinating as those of the aristocrats he documented. “When it comes to the folkways of the rich, the powerful, and the privileged, Stephen Birmingham knows what he's talking about.” —Los Angeles Times

In The New Midlife Self-Writing, Wittman treats recent self-writing by Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, Sarah Manguso, and Maggie Nelson, carefully situating these vital midlife works within the history of self-writing. She argues that they renew and redirect the autobiographical trajectories characteristic of earlier self-writing by switching their orientation to face the future and by celebrating midlife as a growing season, a time of Bildung. In each chapter, writer-by-writer, she demonstrates how the midlife self-writers in question trace confident and future-oriented paths through the past, rejecting triumphalism and complicating both identity and individualism, just as they refine and redefine genres. Exploring these midlife self-writers as chroniclers of Generation X's midlife in particular, Wittman coins the term'digital absence'to map their unique relationship to new forms of knowledge and knowledge gathering in an Information Age that they are both of and set apart from. She theorizes that their works share a'pedagogical style,'a style characterized by clarity, exposition, and classical rhetoric, as well as a concern with the classroom, offering a warrant for reading them in pedagogical terms in concert with traditional scholarly approaches. Furthermore, Wittman presents readers with a look ahead at the future of midlife self-writing as well as self-writing overall, concluding that we might be looking at the scholarship of the future.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERFINALIST FOR THE 2022 ATLANTIC BOOK AWARDS'EVELYN RICHARDSON NON-FICTION AWARD A deeply personal account of love's restorative ability as it leads renowned novelist Donna Morrissey through mental illness, family death, and despair to becoming a writer--told with charm and inimitable humour.When Donna Morrissey left the only home she had ever known, an isolated Newfoundland settlement, at age 16, she was ready for adventure. She had grown up without television or telephones but had absorbed the tragic stories and comic yarns of her close-knit family and community. The death of her infant brother marked the family, and years later, Morrissey suffers devastating guilt about the accidental death of her teenage brother, whom she'd enticed to join her in the oilfields. Her misery was compounded by her own misdiagnosis of a terminal illness, all of which contributed to crippling anxiety and an actual diagnosis of PTSD. Many of those events and themes would eventually be transformed and recast as fictional gold in Morrissey's novels. In another writer's hands, Morrissey's account of her personal story could easily be a tragedy. Instead, she combines darkness and light, levity and sadness into her tale, as her indomitable spirit and humour sustain her. Morrissey's path takes her from the drudgery of being a grocery clerk (who occasionally enlivens her shift with recreational drugs) to western oilfields, to marriage and divorce and working in a fish-processing plant to support herself and her two young children. Throughout her struggles, she nourishes a love of learning and language.Morrissey layers her account of her life with stories of those who came before her, a breed rarely seen in the modern world. It centers around iron-willed women: mothers and daughters, wives, sisters, teachers and mentors who find the support, the wind for their wings, outside the bounds given to them by nature. And it is a mysterious older woman she meets in Halifax who eventually unleashes the writer that Morrissey is destined to become. An inspiring and insightful memoir, Pluck illustrates that even when you find yourself unravelling, you can find a way to spin the yarns that will save you--and delight readers everywhere.

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.

The 21th century is characterized by a distinct pictorial and highly subjective turn; so the power of the visual image and the potency of self-fashioning in art history and visual culture is a major field of study. And subjective, individual literature is a common element in traditional hagiography, biography and life writing. This anthology seeks to describe and analyze contemporary and traditional self-presentations in ways that incorporate both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The authors wish to probe into why we have this need to write and paint true life stories. What is the relationship between a lived life and a literary life? What role do life stories play in literary, theological and aesthetical works? Do they obey certain patterns? The volume brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and historical periods to focus on life writing, hagiography and biography in texts and images from Antiquity to the 21th century; it wishes to focus on the embedded dualities of such lives and texts: lives and life stories may have complex functions as emblems, exempla, and symbols, at the same time as referring to and/or representing authentic life experiences. Il 21° secolo è caratterizzato da una svolta pittorica e altamente soggettiva; così il potere dell'immagine visiva e la potenza del'self-fashioning'nella storia dell'arte e nella cultura visiva è uno dei principali campi di studio. E la letteratura soggettiva e individuale è un elemento comune nell'agiografia tradizionale, nella biografia e nella scrittura di vita. Questa antologia cerca di descrivere e analizzare alcune auto-presentazioni contemporanee e tradizionali in base a criteri che incorporano sia prospettive sincroniche che diacroniche. Gli autori vogliono sondare i motivi per i quali abbiamo questa necessità di scrivere e dipingere storie di vita vere. Qual è la relazione tra una vita vissuta e una vita letteraria? Che ruolo giocano le storie di vita in opere letterarie, teologiche ed estetiche? Obbediscono a certi schemi? Il volume riunisce studiosi di un'ampia gamma di discipline e periodi storici per concentrarsi sulla scrittura di vita, l'agiografia e la biografia in testi e immagini dall'antichità al 21° secolo, con lo scopo di concentrare l'attenzione sulle dualità incorporate in tali vite e testi: le vite e le storie di vita possono avere funzioni complesse come emblemi, esempi e simboli, allo stesso tempo riferendosi e / o rappresentando esperienze di vita autentiche. Contents: Introduction: The Role of a Life in Life-Writing. Female Narrators: Frida Forsgren, Exemplary Lives: Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo as Californian Proto-Feminists; Sissel Lie, Monster and Model: Claude Cahun and Her Many Lives; Oddvar Holmesland, From Hagiography and Romance to Oroonoko. Genre Bending: Per Sivefors, Dreams, Autobiography and the Upward Journey in Girolamo Cardano's De vita propria liber; Roy Eriksen, Mythopoeic Transformations: The Creation of the Eusthatius Legend and Its Syncretist and Secular Afterlife; Charles I. Armstrong, Life Writing and Life-Forms. Hagiography in Ciaran Carson's Shamrock Tea. Meditations on the life of Jesus Christ: Årstein Justnes, An Idealized Childhood: The Origin of The Messiah in Matthew 1-2; Marilena Parlati, Dying in the Desert: Jim Crace and the Life of Jesus in Quarantine; Tor Vegge, Paul and Josephus. Two First Century Jews and their Self-Presentations. Contributors.

New creative forms of life writing have emerged over the past four decades. Following in the footsteps of the “New Biographers,” who more than half a century earlier had trusted art and imagination to uncover some truth about a singular existence, some late-twentieth and twenty-first century novelists, playwrights and essayists staged the lives of writers they loved, wanted to vindicate, or whose influence they needed to acknowledge and ward off. In other cases, they turned to another sort of genealogy and, blurring the lines between biography and autobiography, told the story of their parents'lives.This volume includes ten essays on American, British and Canadian writers'biographies and family histories, ranging, chronologically speaking, from Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) to Lila Azam Zanganeh's The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (2011). The connection between biography and fiction is explored, and analysed in the light of different veins of postmodernism—ludic, nostalgic and subversive. The contributors give pride of place to those biographical enterprises in which generic distinctions yield to transgeneric recompositions, ontological frontiers are crossed, genders are queered, women artists empowered, and the creating subject revealed to be fundamentally elusive and plural.

In The Outlaw Jón Gnarr describes the harsh world of his teenage years and wrestles with painful, bleak memories of this troubled stage of his life, physically abused and surrounded by suicides. He uses punk music to cope, but also discovers an interest in girls and ponders philosophical questions of right and wrong and how to be true to himself.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMESFifty years after Evelyn Waugh's death, here is a completely fresh view of one of the most gifted -- and fascinating -- writers of our time, the enigmatic author of Brideshead Revisited. Graham Greene hailed Waugh as ‘the greatest novelist of my generation', and in recent years his reputation has only grown. Now Philip Eade has delivered an authoritative and hugely entertaining biography that is full of new material, much of it sensational.Eade builds upon the existing Waugh lore with access to a remarkable array of unpublished sources provided by Waugh's grandson, including passionate love letters to Baby Jungman – the Holy Grail of Waugh research - a revealing memoir by Waugh's first wife Evelyn Gardner (“Shevelyn”), and an equally significant autobiography by Waugh's commanding officer in World War II. Eade's gripping narrative illuminates Waugh's strained relationship with his sentimental father and blatantly favoured elder brother; his love affairs with male classmates at Oxford and female bright young things thereafter; his disastrous first marriage and subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism; his insane wartime bravery; his drug-induced madness; his singular approach to marriage and fatherhood; his complex relationship with the aristocracy; the astonishing power of his wit; and the love, fear, and loathing that he variously inspired in others.One of Eade's aims is ‘to re-examine some of the distortions and misconceptions that have come to surround this famously complex and much mythologized character'.‘This might look like code for a plan to whitewash the overly blackwashed Waugh,'comments veteran Waugh scholar Professor Donat Gallagher; ‘but readers fixated on atrocities will not be disappointed... I have been researching and writing about Waugh since 1963 and Eade time and again surprised and delighted me.'Waugh was famously difficult and Eade brilliantly captures the myriad facets of his character even as he casts new light on the novels that have dazzled generations of readers.

Kaufman's Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by the Creely bullies, who often terrify him. It's the Pittsburgh of the early and mid-1960s, a threshold time just before the full counter culture arrives, and a time when suburban society begins to encroach on Kaufman's Hill, the boy's sanctuary and the setting of many of his adventures. As the hill and the 1950s vanish into the twilight, so does the world of the narrator's boyhood.

Esta investigación se desarrolla en tres ámbitos de imponente amplitud: la narración autobiográfica, el texto literario y la obra de Salvador Dalí. El eje vertebrador es la consideración de la autobiografía como obra artística, lo cual conlleva un análisis de los diferentes niveles del texto, así como de sus valores literarios. La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, publicada en 1942, es más que un texto que sirve de ejemplificación de cuestiones especulativas; es una obra donde se expresa de forma excepcional la complejidad de los temas que cubre la reflexión teórica sobre lo autobiográfico, desde el problema de la referencia, la veracidad y la simulación a la creación de realidad, lenguaje e identidad, pasando por cuestiones ya clásicas como la (in)compatibilidad entre la ficción y la memoria biográfica.

Argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significance Textual Deceptions considers a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary works in which the relationship between text and author is not what it seems. By exploring a variety of examples of false or embellished memoirs, purportedly autobiographical novels that are in fact thoroughly fictional, as well as bogus authorial personae, Sue Vice discusses whether it is possible to judge veracity by means of textual clues alone. The accounts featured range from ‘misery memoirs'to Holocaust testimony, poetry purportedly by a Hiroshima survivor, short stories by an Albanian civil servant, fiction by an Aboriginal woman and by a former male prostitute. The book explores both why such texts arise, including consideration of writers'motives as well as pressures from the publishing industry, readers'tastes and contemporary social issues, and also how such texts are constructed, concluding with an assessment of their literary merit. Key Features: Analyses the background, literary construction and value of a wide range of recent false memoirs and literary deceptions Considers whether internal detail alone is sufficient to identify the truth-value or otherwise of a text, or if other evidence must be invoked Explores the contradiction between contemporary literary critics'adherence to Roland Barthes's notion of the ‘death of the author', and the apparently supreme importance of the role and biography of authors in the scandals that accompany revelations of deception

This volume offers sixteen original essays that attest to the extraordinary inventiveness and range of modernist autobiography. It examines the ways modernist writers chose to tell their life stories, with particular attention to forms, venues, modes of address, and degrees of truthfulness. The essays are grouped around a set of rubrics that isolate the distinctive character and shared preoccupations of modernist life-writings: questions of ancestry and tradition that foreground the modernists'troubled relation to their immediate familial as well as cultural past; their emergence as writers whose experiences found expression in untraditional and singular forms; their sense of themselves as survivors of personal and historical traumas; and their burdens as self-chroniclers of loss, especially of self-loss. It will appeal especially to scholars and students of literary modernism and English literature more generally.

In light of materialist revisions of the Cartesian dual self and the increased recognition of memoir and autobiography as a crucial cultural index, the physical body has emerged in the last twenty-five years as an increasingly inescapable object of inquiry, speculation, and theory that intersects all of the various subgenres of life writing. New Essays on Life Writing and the Body thus offers a timely, original, focused, and yet appropriately interdisciplinary study of life writing. This collection brings together new work by established authorities in autobiography, such as Timothy Dow Adams, G. Thomas Couser, Cynthia Huff, and others, along with essays by emerging scholars in the field. Subjects range from new interpretations of well-known autobiographies by Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Lucy Grealy, as well as scholarly surveys of more recently defined subgenres, such as the numerous New Woman autobiographies of the late 19th century, adoption narratives, and sibling memoirs of the mentally impaired. Due to their wide, interdisciplinary focus, these essay will prove valuable not only to more traditional literary scholars interested in the classic literary autobiography but also to those in Women's Studies, Ethnic and African-American Studies, as well as in emerging fields such as Disability Studies and Cognitive Studies.

In our age, self-publishing, self-broadcasting, and telling stories about our own lives and the lives of others are all-pervasive. This is also the age of the witness, the age of testimony in which first-hand accounts, personal experience, life change and evolution are valued, for good or ill, over distanced reflection. What are we to make of all this telling of lives? The essays collected in Life Writing: The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art from writers and academics associated with the Centre for Life Narrative Studies at Kingston University in London, begin to address this very question, and in doing so demonstrate the fluidity and diversity of life writing itself. The remit of the Centre for Life Narratives is to rise to the challenge poised to writers, teachers and researchers alike by this very fluidity and diversity in our discipline and is exemplified here with contributions from academics, curators, editors and biographers, including Neal Ascherson,Victoria Glendinning, Professor Kathryn Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Blake Morrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This collection of essays from CLN offers the reader our founding contribution to the debates that surround this era-defining genre and as such presents both the state of the art and the spirit of our age.

Rosalia Baena's theoretically challenging, analytical volume of essays, explores the diversity of shapes that transcultural life writing takes, demonstrating how it has become one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms of self-inscription and self-representation.Expanding much of the contemporary criticism on life writing, which tends to centre on content, the essays highlight that reading contemporary forms of life writing from a literary perspective is a rich field of critical intervention that has been overlooked because of recent cultural studies'concerns with material issues. To read life writing as primarily cultural texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities.This book was previously published as a special issue of Prose Studies.

Wide-ranging and engaging, Selves in Question considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa.The twenty-seven interviews presented here consider both the ontological status and the representation of the self. They remind us that the self is constantly under construction in webs of interlocution and that its status and representation are always in question. The contributors, therefore, look at ways in which auto/biographical practices contribute to placing, understanding, and troubling the self and selves in postcolonies in the current global constellation. They examine topics such as the contexts conducive to production processes; the contents and forms of auto/biographical accounts; and finally, their impact on the producers and the audience. In doing so they map out a multitude of variables--including the specific historical juncture, geo-political locations, social positions, cultures, languages, generations, and genders--in their relations to auto/biographical practices. Those interviewed include the famous and the hardly known, women and men, writers and performers who communicate in a variety of languages: Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, and Yiddish. An extensive introduction offers a general framework on the contestation of self through auto/biography, a historical overview of auto/biographical representation in South Africa up to the present time, an outline of theoretical and thematic issues at stake in southern Africa auto/biography, and extensive primary and secondary biographies.Interviewees: Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Valentine Cascarino, Vanitha Chetty, Wilfred Cibane, Greig Coetzee, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Faber, David Goldblatt, Stephen Gray, Dorian Haarhoff, Rayda Jacobs, Elsa Joubert, K. Limakatso Kendall, Ester Lee, Doris Lessing, Sindiwe Magona, Margaret McCord, N. Chabani Manganyi, Zolani Mkiva, Jonathan Morgan, Es'kia Mphahlele, Rob Nixon, Mpho Nthunya, Robert Scott, Gillian Slovo, Alex J. Thembela, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Johan van Wyk, Wilhelm Verwoerd, David Wolpe, D. L. P.Yali Manisi.

For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers. Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding. Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country. This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.

The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed. Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuses on how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship. By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

Using contemporary autobiography theory and literary, historical, and ethnographic approaches, Wong explores the transformation of Native American autobiography from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives through late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century life histories to written contemporary autobiographies. This book expands the definition of autobiography to include non-written forms of personal narrative and non-Western concepts of self, highlighting the incorporation of traditional tribal modes of self-narration with Western forms of autobiography and charting the historical transition from orality to literacy.

Autobiographical literature especially reveals the processes by which writers convert their own historical experience into fictional form and suggests how literary forms function in life. This volume defines an original theory of autobiographical writing and provides intriguing analyses of major American works of literature. The Art of Life examines the transformation of history into literature in Walden,'Song of Myself,'Henry James's Prefaces, The Education of Henry Adams, Paterson, and the poetry of Frank O'Hara. These works are approached as events in themselves and are analyzed as conversions of form and history, fiction and fact, and even aesthetics and politics. Thus the work of literature is set in the total experience of living, and the writer is seen not only as an artist but also as a person in a historical, political, and cultural environment. As well as a creator of literature, the writer is viewed as a social, psychological, and biological being. Chapters on the narcissistic economy of Walden, the mythicizing of history and personality in'Song of Myself,'the self-conscious relation that makes the Prefaces of Henry James the autobiography of an artist. the comic perspective of The Education of Henry Adams, and the radical innovation of Paterson and O'Hara's poetry provide new readings of major American works. Each chapter contains some distinct critical insight which not only contributes to, but can be relished apart from, the book's overarching theoretical argument. The Art of Life is a sophisticated theoretical discussion of autobiography with rich psychological, philosophical, and cultural ramifications.

Focusing on the representation of same-sex desire in Victorian autobiographical writing, Oliver Buckton offers significant new readings of works by some of the most influential figures in late-nineteenth-century literature and culture. Combining original research, careful historical analysis, and contemporary theories of autobiography, gender, and sexual identity, he provides nuanced studies of confessional narratives by Edward Carpenter, John Henry Newman, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and, in an epilogue, E. M. Forster. By examining the'confessional'elements of these writings, Buckton brings'secrecy'into focus as a central and productive component of autobiographical discourse. He challenges the conventional view of secrecy as the suppression of information, instead using the term to suggest an oscillation between authorial self-disclosure and silence or reserve--a strategy for arousing the reader's interest and establishing a relation based on shared knowledge while deferring or displacing the revelation of potentially incriminating and scandalous desires. Though theirdisclosures of same-sex desire jeopardized the cultural privilege granted these writers by Victorian codes of authorship and masculinity, their use of secrecy, Buckton shows, allowed them to protect themselves from Victorian stigma and to challenge prevailing constructions of sexual identity.Originally published in 1998.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In four haunting family stories, Ellen Douglas seeks to track down the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. Progressively searching further and further back in time, each of these four family tales involves collusion and secrets. In'Grant,'a randy old uncle dying in the author's house is nursed by a beautiful black woman while his white family watches from a'respectful'distance. Who loves him better? When truth is death, who is braver facing it? In'Julia and Nellie,'very close cousins make'a marriage in all but name'back in the days of easy scandal. The nature of the liaison never mentioned, the family waives its Presbyterian morality in the face of family deviance. In'Hampton,'her grandmother's servant, who has constructed a world closed to whites, evades the author's tentative efforts at a meeting of minds. And finally, in'On Second Creek,'Douglas confronts her obsession with the long-lost--or -buried--facts of the'examination and execution'of slaves who may or may not have plotted an uprising. Having published fiction for four decades, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact. It's a book, she says,'about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling.'It's about secrets, judgments, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in'truth.'Praise for Ellen Douglas:'It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer.'--Richard Ford;'Proust wrote in one of his last letters,'one must never be afraid of going too far, for the truth is beyond.'Ellen Douglas has taken this very much to heart and has sought the truth in a region beyond falsehood; through falsehood, in effect. It's a fascinating performance.'--Shelby Foote.