Through the Looking Glass - Writers' Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century

Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-83-233-4290-8
Verlag: Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Wydawnictwo

Buch, Englisch, 227 Seiten, Format (B × H): 235 mm x 160 mm, Gewicht: 382 g

Reihe: Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English

Through the Looking Glass provides a detailed and comprehensive study of the writer’s memoir and an exploration of the genre’s poetics. It presents the critical history of memoir and develops its own definition of the genre by focusing on such markers as phantasmatism of the pact between writer and reader, (auto)biographism of the space inhabited by the text, syllepsism of the subject, detotalization in terms of scope, and thematic content. The study also proposes an original typology of fifteen micro-genres of memoir (souvenirs d’enfance, souvenirs d’adolescence, falling away memoir, memoirs/scenes from life, patriography, matriography, parental memoir, autrememoir, pet memoir, [auto]pathography, [auto]thanatography, travelogue, periegetic memoir, ekphrastic memoir, and bibliomemoir). Out of over forty memoirs addressed by this study, five writers’ memoirs (by Andrew Motion, Rachel Cusk, Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and J.M. Coetzee, respectively) are addressed in greater detail and thus acknowledged as the genre’s prime specimens.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kusek, Robert

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Robert Kusek is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, poetics of memory and loss, as well as a comparative approach to literary studies.