seductions of literature: in the ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, which he composed in 1808 and revised in 1826, he described his continuing delight in Did Mark Twain bring down the temple? 9 the ballads of chivalry, the ‘Delilahs of [his] imagination’ guiltily enjoyed in secret beyond boyhood.4 In Life on the Mississippi, published a little over sixty years after Ivanhoe in 1883, Mark Twain delivered an indictment of sorcery on Scott himself, via the literary seduction his novels had wrought on the imagination of the American South: Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his
his modest autobiography is a mere essay. This has left the record of his opinions of personal encounters somewhat sketchy. For Whitehead on Whitehead see ‘Autobiographical Notes’, in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosopher, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, pp. 1–14. Stein, Toklas, pp. 167, 165, 166, 167. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 89. Stein, Toklas, pp. 206–8. Wagner-Martin, ‘Favored Strangers’, pp. 123. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, London, Macmillan, 1925, p
story of the shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk. Most critics, however, have identified a different and more chap5.p65 127 13/02/03, 14:23 128 More than a game complex relationship with the real in Robinson Crusoe than that location in simple autobiographical or biographical reference. This has never been a text read solely as ‘about’ one individual, whether that individual is defined as Defoe, Crusoe, or Selkirk, but as a text that says much about the cultural moment of its production – whether in terms of faith, individualism, or capitalism. When Karl Marx read
La Motte and Mary Borden in her autobiographical account: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin, 2001 [1933]): 172, 184–5. On the deliberately challenging nature of Stein’s writing, see: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010): 36. On the nature of early-twentieth-century literary modernism, see: Lawrence Rainey, Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005): xix–xxix; Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby
brief account of Kate Luard’s early experiences of the First World War, see: Christine E. Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): Chapter 1. 25 Anon., Diary of a Nursing Sister: 52–3. On nursing work on hospital trains, see: Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Chapter 1. 26 Anon., Diary of a Nursing Sister: 88–90. 27 Anon., Diary of a Nursing Sister: 206. 28 Anon., Diary of a Nursing Sister: 212. 29 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London: Virago Press, 2004
. Few Canadian nursing sisters therefore had any significant experience of acute hospital practice post-registration. Finally, it is worth noting the value of those novels that explore nursing in the Second World War. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Monica Dickens’ semi- autobiographical One Pair of Feet44 do not form a major part of the analysis in this book, but their focus on the work of nurses supports our understanding of the war and the nurse’s place in it. In the introduction to the 1937 edition of A General Textbook of
nationalist self and other is sharpest in the most openly autobiographical discourse of Plaatje’s text, the chapter devoted to the death of his infant son which is directly lifted from Du Bois’s own chapter on the passing of his first-born. Du Bois never tells us his child’s name. This suggests that the child is to be viewed not as an individual but as an anonymous representative of his race. His name is, effectively, ‘Negro and a Negro’s son’ (p. 170). Since the son is an abstraction for the race, his loss comes to represent the losses experienced by the race as a whole
path of St Vincent’s first Chief Minister, Ebenezer Joshua, prior to the country’s attainment of Associate Statehood with Britain, on the way to full political independence in 1979. The novel suggests that the politician’s interest in enhancing Hiroona’s ‘civilisation’ through nation-building is a smoke-screen for a self-seeking career in politics, and its autobiographical form lays out the strategies
by vested interests. But my argument is not just that Hesse’s humanism is untenable and unpersuasive Art in time of war 41 now, ‘after Auschwitz’, but that it was already so at the time in which he proposed it. In fact, I believe it hardly survived the insight of autobiographical works of his own like Steppenwolf. Without doubting Hesse’s sincerity, I’ve often wondered whether other artists haven’t always paid lip service to the humanist defence of art by way of licensing an aesthetic vision which they knew contravened it. One is reminded in this connection of
, shopfronts, farm animals and country folk. 20 For a full account of Dublin’s developer culture see F. McDonald, The Construction of Dublin (Dublin: Grandon, 2000). eih ch-7.P65 137 26/3/03, 15:14 138 Keohane & Kuhling 21 Louis Walsh, ‘The starmaker’, interview, RTE Guide, 21 April 2001. 22 W. Benjamin, ‘Paris: capital of the nineteenth century’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1978). 23 W. Benjamin, ‘The interior, the trace’, in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1999
