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This conclusion argues that auto/biography is shadowed by the alter ego of scepticism, whether directed at the reality or intelligibility of selves; their representability; or the adequacy of the available forms of representation. It summarizes the resulting positions of anti‐subjectivity and autobiograficton, arguing that the sceptical engagements with life‐writing display a markedly performative dimension, using theoretical concepts from Judith Butler and Sidonie Smith. The notion of the performative reintroduces the ideas of fictionality and creativity to the heart of the autobiographic project; and to that extent could be said to inscribe even in formal autobiography some of the key qualities discovered here in more hybrid works, of ‘autobiografiction’ and imaginary writing. A literary autobiography's relation to a fictional oeuvre is discussed as working according to Derrida's logic of the supplement, with a comparable effect: posing autobiography as outside fiction, but infiltrating the autobiographical into the fiction, and thus reciprocally, the fictional into the autobiography. What such arguments bring out is how autobiography and fiction, while posed as mutually exclusive, are in fact profoundly interdependent, and constitute throughout the last two centuries a system of modern self‐representation which might itself be termed ‘autobiografiction’.

The introduction starts from comments by Wilde and Nietzsche arguing that criticism and philosophy — and by extension all writing — can be read as autobiographical; and argues that such a move simultaneously puts autobiography into question. It considers how recent theoretical accounts of autobiography have had little to say about the difference between ‘autobiography’ and an ‘autobiographical’ work. It introduces key terms for this study, especially life-writing and autobiografiction. It argues that most critical discussions of modernism have failed to take account of its complex formal engagements with life-writing. It discusses the methodological implications of such terminology.

This chapter develops the preceding one's account of autobiographical writing which swerves into fiction. It explores the hybrid form identified in Stephen Reynolds's 1906 essay ‘Autobiografiction.’ Reynolds's arguments are examined in detail. The significance of the body of work he identifies, fusing spiritual experience, fictional narrative, and the essay, is discussed in relation to a growing resistance to conventional forms of auto/biography. One of Reynolds's chief examples is A. C. Benson. Two of his works — The House of Quiet and The Thread of Gold — are analysed in detail, with particular attention to his elaborate play with the forms of life‐writing, and with pseudonymity and posthumousness. Benson's approach to the spiritual through autobiografiction is contextualized in terms of secularization, psychical research, and the emergence of psycho‐analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the trope (deriving from the Nietzsche–Wilde/subjectivist views outlined at the start) that fiction is the best autobiography; and by considering the light the concept of autobiografiction can shed on modernism.

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.

Chapter 1 offers a theoretical account of how aerial violence solicits a temporality of dread, as a present upended by the fear of past trauma and the expectation of future trauma. It argues that Second World War writing is defined by a desire to manage anxieties about death, and, drawing from theories of autobiography, it examines why there was an outpouring of autobiographical narratives at this historical juncture. Comparing Henry Green’s self-portrait Pack My Bag (1940) to Arthur Gwynn-Browne’s Dunkirk memoir F. S. P. (1942), the chapter identifies a ‘wartime style’ that renders, while trying to assuage, the experience of dread experienced on both home front and war front. This focus on life-writing and dread is theorized through Sigmund Freud’s diagnosis of anxiety’s simultaneously injurious and inoculating effects.

This chapter-length close reading of Grey Granite, the third volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A ScotsQuair, considers how he set out consciously to probe the limits of modernist technique by bringing it into conjunction with a fully industrialised social life. The result was not the ‘revolutionary’ perspective of the working class that Gibbon’s peers such as James Barke and Hugh MacDiarmid demanded and it has become a commonplace ever since for male critics of the left to fault Gibbon for ‘lack of engagement with urban working-class lives’. This chapter counters this view with a close reading of the novel focusing on the central female character, Chris Guthrie, drawing particularly on the work of feminist critics (including Jenny Wolmark, Deirdre Burton, Glenda Norquay, Alison Lumsden and Margery Palmer McCulloch) to show how by identifying with female subjectivity, Gibbon found an answer to both the proletarian question of how to express a post-capitalist culture and the modernist question of how to identify a collective that would support a liberated identity.

Chapter 4 is an extended close reading of John Sommerfield’s experimental proletarian novel May Day, which can be seen as an attempt to both prove the utility of modernist techniques – drawing in particular on the work of Virginia Woolf – for communist ends as well as demonstrating what a communist perspective offers modernist techniques. Sommerfield employs Woolf’s techniques to focus on the seemingly-random connections thrown up by capitalist social relations surrounding the production process and thus sets out an opposition between the concrete possibilities offered by modern intersubjective networks and the barriers set to those by the capitalist framework within which everyone is imprisoned (the upper-class as much as the working-class characters). A significant aspect of his approach lies in his focus on working-class women ranging from married mother, Martine Seton, to the Work’s manager’s mistress, Jenny Hardy, and the Communist activist, Ivy Cutford. Sommerfield is shown to be fundamentally concerned with how to replicate the successful incorporation of female unconsciousness and sexuality by individualist modernist novels into a collectivist novel concerned with society as a whole.