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This chapter explores how two middle-class women writers shaped early and dramatically different versions of the new female factory worker. The chapter juxtaposes Sarah Savage's 1814 novel, The Factory Girl (about the virtuous Mary Burnam) with Catharine Williams's 1833 account, Fall River, which is an authentic narrative, of the miserable life and gruesome death of Sarah Maria Cornell, an actual factory operative. Cornell's tainted sexual reputation, her history of shoplifting, and her camp meeting predilections contrast starkly with the habits of the self-disciplined and rational Mary Burnam. Significantly, the only quality shared by the factual and the fictional factory worker is that both are readers and writers who aspire to a larger life for both body and mind. Both are, however, equally imaginative constructions, based on a mixture of historical fact and literary invention, created by more affluent writers fascinated with the new realm of wage-earning women. Together, Savage and Williams establish conflicting reputations for the woman worker that anticipate her imminent (and distinctive) written invention of herself.

This chapter makes a bridge between Grass's non-fictional and his fictional self-presentation through close-readings of two quasi-autobiographical pieces, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980). Drawing on Serge Doubrovsky's term ‘autofiction’ and Wolfgang Iser's idea of how literary texts perform meaning, it is argued that the particularly self-conscious literary form that Grass develops not only allows him to experiment with his own position as author within the text, but also renders problematic readings that seek to explain the texts solely through their socio-political circumstances. Taking up Grass's later reference to the autobiographical mode as a question of ‘narrating oneself in variations’ and incorporating previously undiscussed archival material, this chapter develops an understanding of literature as a space for self-invention in which the author's biographical self is suspended, or ‘encapsulated’, and the textual reality of the creative process takes over.

Stephen R. Covey launches First Things First with a story about his daughter Maria, who had given birth to her third child. Maria loved her new baby, but felt that the duties of motherhood were taking all of her time. As a father, Covey advised her daughter that the baby was the first thing in her life, and that she also needed to forget about her other priorities and stop worrying. His advice was neither gender neutral nor socially progressive. The solution Covey proposes is legitimized through a robust sort of nostalgia that appeals to scriptural wisdom, traditional metaphors, and American myths. The suggestion that Covey offers Maria is one which is not widely available to American women and their families. She is encouraged to pursue an ideal of self-invention and self-mastery that hails from a culture where someone else's labors would provide for the necessities of daily life.

This chapter examines the creation and distribution of popular photographic portraiture in Dakar. It shows how bodies and selves, once subjugated within a colonial imaginary, have been reclaimed and reformed through postcolonial strategies of self-invention. It discusses the transformations of Dakar from cosmopolitan showpiece to site of socioeconomic collapse and argues that the practices of portraiture subverts the colonial male gaze with its own techniques and reframes the feminine body.

This chapter examines Rachid Djaïdani’sfilm Rengaine which, like his previous works, questions classification, eludes labels, and fosters universalist ideals. Rengaine initiates a dialogue between the particular and the universal, between the traditional family order marked by patriarchal domination and the assertion of a cultural, ethnic, and sexual identity whose fluidity makes it open to negotiation.

Stemming from different engagements with the colonial past and its postcolonial avatars, and presenting contrasting views of the colonial fortune, the works of Marie NDiaye and Stéphane Audeguy lay bare the imperfections, frictions and jagged edges of contemporary identity construction.

This chapter systematizes the conception of the self into an “appropriative model” of the self and defends it against various objections and rival positions. This conception of oneself as self-appropriation emphasizes the fluid and constructed character of self-relations in which we are not simply given to ourselves. Unlike the poststructuralist critique of the subject, however, it insists on the possibility of distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful ways of appropriating ourselves. Only in this way can one speak of self-alienation while avoiding the trap of essentialism. The chapter begins by proposing an appropriative conception of the self based on Hegelian and (broadly) existentialist positions. It then addresses objections to its critique of essentialism or to the ostensible implications of an antiessentialist approach, arguing that antiessentialism denies both the unity of the self and its intractability. It also examines the intractable elements of personal identity and the idea of inwardness as the individual's internal refuge from the world. Finally, it discusses the issue of self-invention as opposed to self-discovery, along with the idea of the multiplicity and the hybrid character of identity.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book offers an account of the life of James Francis Brown (1793–1868) based on the diary he kept from 1829 to 1866. What makes Brown's story compelling is that although he was born a slave in Maryland, he was able to forge a new and successful life for himself in upstate New York as a master gardener for the Verplancks, a wealthy white family in rural upstate New York. Brown lived there in a house he owned with his wife, Julia, whose freedom he purchased from her Maryland slaveowner. The present biography is inspired by the conviction that the most meaningful aspects of his life have been hidden in plain view for too long, and that it was his intention that they be uncovered. Brown's life is a palimpsest perceived here against the backdrop of national developments. For sure, it substantiates and expands extant knowledge about slavery, fugitive slaves, and free blacks in the Hudson Valley and in the North. In so doing, it confirms a picture of both black agency and quintessential American self-invention.

This chapter explores why we read memoir differently from fiction. While the memoir and the novel may mirror each other in form, in force they may be quite different. Among the things memoir can do that fiction cannot is to immortalize—or at least memorialize—actual people. Seeking to immortalize oneself is not necessarily a noble motive; hence the redundancy of the celebrity memoir. But conferring a kind of immortality on a partner, parent, child, or friend in memoir can be an act of real generosity. At its best, life writing does not register preexisting selfhood, but rather somehow creates it. This inverts the intuitive idea that one lives one's life, then simply writes it down. Instead, in writing one's life one may bring a new self into being. If this is true, then in reading life narrative, we witness self-invention.

This introduction makes the case for ‘modern baroque’, arguing that ‘modernism’ is, in effect, a modern version of classicism, analytic and theory-led. It argues that despite the modernists’ attempts to control and define ‘culture’, the overall context of the interwar period is one in which black, female, working-class and/or homosexual people acquired the ability to generate their own strands within the culture, due to the proliferation of media able to cater for plural audiences (books, but also film, radio, and live performance). Modernism thus existed in dialectic with a modern baroque, but less theoretical, which is why it has not been recognized as such, and more inclusive, more eclectic, much more in dialogue with the past, unafraid of the grotesque or surreal. Insofar as modern baroque has a theoretical basis, it is provided by surrealism.

This chapter examines the social aspect of the interwar arts. It demonstrates that the genuinely innovative were almost all dependent on personal patronage to support the early stages of their career. The necessity of clientage relationships influenced what was achieved, since the patrons’ interests could not be discounted. Cultural capital was exchanged for social opportunity and financial support. This also gave particular opportunities to gay people of both genders.