Borderlines. Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing locates and investigates the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in various kinds of life-writing dating from the last thirty years. This volume offers a valuable comparative approach to texts by French, English, American, and German authors to illustrate the different forms of experimentation with the borders between genres and literary modes. Gudmundsdóttir tackles important contemporary concerns such as autobiography’s relationship to postmodernism by investigating themes such as memory and crossing cultural divides, the use of photographs in autobiography and the role of narrative in life-writing. This work is of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, postmodernism and contemporary life-writing.
”…illuminating… most worthwhile…” in:
Modern Language Review, Vol. 100, No. 1, 2005
Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction
1 Memory and the Autobiographical Process: Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster
2 The Use of Narrative in Autobiography: Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski
3 Gender and Fiction in Women’s Autobiographical Writing: Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal
4 Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures: Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori
5 Biography in Autobiography
6 Photographs in Autobiography
Conclusion: Postmodernism and Borderlines
Bibliography
Index