Modernist Autobiography, Audience and the Archives

Research output: Contribution to Book/ReportChapterpeer-review

Abstract

A number of autobiographies by modernist writers published in the middle of the twentieth century illustrate a new emerging audience for modernism, both revealing efforts by authors to meet these readers, as well as efforts by readers to catch glimpse of the authors in a different light.

The archives of modernist authors similarly open intimate and revealing glimpses into the ambitions and strategies of the authors of autobiographies, offering new understandings of the continuously vexed relationship between modernists and their various publics. This chapter explores autobiographies by Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein as case studies, detailing how narratives of authorial lives were conceived, documented, published and received.

This chapter outlines what can be discovered in archival research about modernist attitudes to the presentations of authorial lives, exploring questions of promotion, sales and popularity as well as questions of negotiating tensions between high and low art, or aesthetics and celebrity.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives
EditorsJamie Callison, Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen, Erik Tonning
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
Chapter22
Pages285-296
Number of pages11
Edition1
ISBN (Electronic)9781350450592, 9781350450561
ISBN (Print) 9781350450554, 1350450553
Publication statusPublished - 11 Jul 2024

Keywords

  • Art and Celebrity
  • Authorial Presentation
  • Archival Research
  • Reader-Author Dynamics
  • Modernist Autobiographies

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