"Siegfried Sassoon, Meredith, and the Prose Biographer's Impossible Task" (original) (raw)

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Annual Conference, 2021

Abstract

This paper reads Siegfried Sassoon’s 1948 biography Meredith against the autobiographies he wrote during the Second World War. I contend that the process of drafting his own life-story taught Sassoon the impossibility of creating an objective-historical account, long assumed to be fundamental to the genre of life-writing. By close-reading Sassoon-as-narrator’s repeated breaks into Meredith’s seemingly conventional account, I demonstrate Sassoon’s hidden transformation of the literary (auto)biography. Whatever his antipathy towards his modernist contemporaries, Sassoon’s experience writing his own history nevertheless compelled him to overhaul an established genre to address the indeterminacies of self and objective-historical narrative central to modernist writing.

Sean A. McPhail hasn't uploaded this conference presentation.

Let Sean A. know you want this conference presentation to be uploaded.

Ask for this conference presentation to be uploaded.