This book explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing - biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal - increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century, identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 - which provides a key term for this study - as 'Autobiografiction'. Examples discussed include Pater, Ruskin, Proust, 'Mark
Rutherford', George Gissing, Samuel Butler, Edmund Gosse, and the strange figure of A. C. Benson. The concept of Autobiografiction proves powerful not only in the new perspective
it offers on turn-of-the-century literature, but in the ways it enables a radically new literary history of Modernism. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as Impressionism turns into Modernism, and consists of detailed readings of key Modernist texts by Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf, and juxtaposing their work with others whose experiments with life-writing forms are no less striking, including Henry Adams, H. G. Wells, Hesketh Pearson, Maurice Baring,
Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Max Beerbohm, and Harold Nicolson.
