History of Autofiction

Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo, Norway, and teaches Anglophone and comparative literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression: A Reconsideration of Metalepsis (2017) co-editor of The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms (2021) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour: A Playfully Serious Affective Mode (2023). As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective."

Effe provides a much-needed historical perspective to the study of autofiction, a genre that has been dismissed as mere current fashion or postmodern posturing. In demonstrating that the autofictional has existed since the origin of the English novel, Effe paints a deeper, broader, and more historically-accurate portrayal of the field.

• Introduction 1What Is Autofiction and What Can It Do? 171. A Cognitive Perspective on Fictionality 192. Autofiction as Cognitive Duality and Textual Doubling 313. Affordances and Effects 41Part I—Claiming a Voice: Eighteenth-Century Autofictional Beginnings 574. Marketing a Mutable Author Persona: “Romantick Names, and a feign’dScene of Action” in Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella 695. Claiming the Right to Self-Publishing and Self-Editing: Alexander Pope’s“disguises … of sentiment [and] style” 836. Shaping a Private Self Publicly: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s TurkishEmbassy Letters and Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Culture 937. Deliberating “ornament of stile or diction, or even of circumstance”: HenryFielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon 1018. Living Alternative Lives in Writing: Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy“shall lead a couple of fine lives together” 113Coda: From Letters, Diaries, and Transcripts to Books 125Part II—Hiding in Plain Sight: Autofictional Experiments of the LongNineteenth Century 1299. Romantic Freedoms in the Search for Generic Conventions 13710. Self-Formation within Victorian (Generic) Constraints 17511. Fin-de-siècle Transgressions of Identities and Generic Modes 197Coda: From Pseudo-Disguise to Explicit Displacement 219Part III—Reimagining Selves and Genres: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-CenturyAutofictional Innovations 22312. Late Modernist Explorations of Genre and Self 23513. Postmodernist Self-Creation and Self-Negation 26514. Post-Postmodernist Collaborative World-Building 293Coda: From Reader Observation to Collaboration 327Conclusion 331