Mortal pages, literary lives

This volume offers an innovative reassessment of the practice and theory of autobiography in the nineteenth century, calling upon both contemporary and more recent interpretative approaches. One question that emerges is how far autobiography exists as a separate genre, and how far it is a necessary and ubiquitous impulse. Beyond this is the larger debate as to whether autobiographical texts express a prior essence or whether they are the site of continual acts of self-fashioning.