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This chapter argues that the notion of ‘aesthetic autobiography’, attached by Suzanne Nalbantian to the modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman, in fact originates in the way earlier writers such as Ruskin and Gosse develop literary forms to construct their lives as aesthetically motivated. Ruskin's impressionist autobiography is investigated as a precursor of early twentieth‐century literary autobiographies by James, Conrad and Ford. Particular attention is paid to time, memory, impressions, and reading. The chapter proposes a changing view of ‘mediation’ through the period, arguing that Realism denies the mediation of reality by art; impressionism accepts the mediation of reality, but locates it in the process of perception and consciousness; modernism combines this interest in phenomenology with an awareness of how language or form mediates between the subject and the object; whereas postmodernism is founded on a denial, or suppression, of the objectivity of the object. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Proust (of all modernists the most indebted to Ruskin, and a sophisticated analyst of impressionism), from the rejection of biography in Contre Sainte‐Beuve to the fictionalization of autobiography in A la recherche. The essay on Ruskin, ‘On Reading’, is used to show how as for Ruskin autobiography is an act of reading, for Proust reading is an act of autobiography. Ruskinian impressionism is thus seen as also anticipating the modernist fictionalized auto/biography discussed in Part II.

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.

This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.

The introduction’s title is taken from a quote by Henry James that underlines the book’s focus on the self-theorising artist: the idea that autobiographical writing shows the author’s mirrored reflection as well as an examination of the reflective surface itself. This idea is introduced alongside other key themes of the book, including the concern with genre, especially the mixed genre of ‘creative autobiography’ and how it compares with the Künstlerroman. The choice of authors studied and their interconnections are explained. It is described how each of the works focused on is a response to the moment of its composition – to the new century, to the shock of the First World War, to the experiments in self-expression or to the uncertainty of the interwar years – making Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘historical horizon’ important to the study. This discussion dwells on Virginia Woolf’s idea that ‘human character changed’ in 1910.

Chapter 1 provides a detailed discussion of the book’s key ideas, beginning with the importance of the author’s own literary apprenticeship as a reader for the writer s/he will become, starting with the ideas of Emerson on influence and reading. The section ‘Tradition and Inheritance: the Künstlerroman’ provides an in-depth history of the German Romantic genre and its relevance for the creative autobiographies studied in the following chapters. It compares the specific form of the artist novel with the Bildungsroman and discusses the meaning and relevance of the term Bildung and the idea of apprenticeship. The section ‘Influence (Inflowing)’ explores the idea of literary inheritances and Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence. It examines how the German genre influenced British Romanticism and twentieth-century life-writing, highlighting the pliability of generic forms, and further how the author’s technical skill in genre mixing displays an understanding of their art form and the quality of their imagination.

In A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother Henry James depicts an apprenticeship in the conversion of impressions into art. By closely paralleling the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, James shows that the complex art of life is also a reflection of his broader artistic programme. The discussion focusses on James’s concept of the ‘fostered imagination’ – the way in which his surroundings, experience and key relationships (e.g. with the painter John LaFarge) shaped his creative development. This chapter concludes that the Bildungsreise or apprenticeship journey at the heart of James’s autobiographical volumes bears witness to and enacts the conversion of a small boy’s quiet observations into the aesthetic manifesto of the mature master. By subtly destabilising the genre with his slight deviations from the traditional model, James casts himself as an artist-hero aware of the constructed nature of personal and public identity, and he skews the focus of his narrative away from self-confession towards art. The Künstlerroman provides James with the means of reframing the increasingly problematic autobiographical premise of a knowable self, allowing him to pursue his quest clothed in the armour of poetic relations.

This chapter examines a wide range of work by Evelyn Waugh—the novels Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved One (1948) and the stories “The Balance” (1926) and “Excursion in Reality” (1932)—in order to show how Waugh develops an overarching narrative aesthetic out of his relationship with film. Engaging with the epistemology of the camera eye and the complexities of film viewing, this broader film writing constantly oscillates between two poles of formal extremism, sometimes risking a mechanical, formulaic rigidity and at other times courting a dissolution into chaotic formlessness. Waugh's aesthetics can therefore be described as bad formalism: one side of this dialectic develops too much form, while the other establishes too little. Neither manages just the right amount of formal production to count as “good” modernist formal innovation. Taken together, these extreme forms attest to the extent to which Waugh's work consistently allegorizes the condition of the late modernist writer struggling to survive a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema, as Waugh's satires take the form of—or rather deform—the Künstlerroman, twisting its narrative into a different shape with a less than heroic end.

This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein's other work, the chapter examines Stein's deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography's underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein's experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, the chapter turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.

Chapter 4 focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset’s acerbic use of sentimentalism to diagnose the tensions inherent in New Negro femininity and artistic production, as exemplified by her novel Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1929). Fauset’s anti-didactic Künstlerroman highlights the conflicted demands of Harlem Renaissance/New Negro ideology and the particularly fraught position of the black female writer. The chapter extends recent scholarship on racial feeling and the gendering of double consciousness to theorize Fauset’s sentimentalism as an ironic and melancholic mode that registers the New Negro woman’s unique form of self-estrangement. Plum Bun ultimately proposes racial laughter as an apt response to the position of a black female artist in late 1920s America: a mode that is at once an adaptive gift of internal distance and a creative prison of the same.