Having discussed some issues around the presentation of self in previous posts through particular influences and examples, this post is going to be a little more abstract. I'm going to consider some of the claims made by Max Saunders in his book, Self-Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Writing (2010). This lengthy study examines the emergence of certain kinds of Modernist writing in the twentieth century out of late nineteenth-century biographical and autobiographical texts. Saunders' book is very handy because of the deft way in which it manages some of the terminology around these topics, considering labels such as biography, autobiography, life-writing and autobiografiction (I'll return to the latter in a bit). One starting point for Saunders is Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'formal autobiography' or 'contractual autobiography', 'in which real author, narrator, and the name on the title‐page all coincide, and seek ...

Caricature of Huysmans In my previous post on Moore and Huysmans I suggested that A rebours (1884)   and Confessions of a Young Man (1887) share a sense of equivocation or ambivalence that might be, in some respects, more truly Decadent than any reference to vice or excess. Another shared connection here is their relation to autobiography. Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes was frequently taken to be modelled upon himself by critics. And  Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as an autobiography - from the second English edition of 1889, the narrator even shared the same name as the author. In both cases, however, autobiographical identifications are important, but complex and hard to sustain at certain points.*  So, in this post and the next, I'll explore some points around Confessions and its vexed and complex status as autobiography. My starting point is passage from early in chapter 1: I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax,...

In the two previous posts, I discussed George Moore's relationship with Émile Zola, suggesting that Confessions of a Young Man reflected a change from admiration and emulation towards a more qualified, even distanced attitude by Moore towards the French novelist. In this post, I'm going to look at the links between Moore and another contemporary French writer, J-K Huysmans. For there are important parallels to be drawn here.  Huysmans is now best known for A rebours (1884), which relates the proclivities of a corrupt and ailing aristocrat, Jean Floressas des Esseintes. Forced into early retirement from Parisian social life by ill health, Des Esseintes retires to his Fontainbleau, where he puts his considerable resources to use in order to indulge his every whim and taste. This ranges from his cultivation of an extreme bibliophile (he commissions bound copies of Baudelaire's work for every day of the week), to sexual excesses (he pursues a complicated relationship with a v...

This post is going to be a bit shorter and more patchy.* More precisely, it's about a current gap in my research. My previous post provided a bit of general information about Émile Zola and how important he was to George Moore. I suggested that Moore set himself up as an authority on Zola in London in the early 1880s, by writing critical articles about him, translating Zola's work and writing about him in Confessions of a Young Man . As an earlier post pointed out, however, Moore's attitude and disposition towards Zola changed considerably - where his early articles express sympathy and enthusiasm for the French writer, his later was response was more qualified even critical. I'm hoping to capture some of this in the appendices to the critical edition of Confessions that I'm working on, by reproducing some excerpts from Moore's journalism. But this is where I have run into problems, exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic and crisis. Moore wrote an article for Eng...