Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biographyAuto/biography is currently one of the most popular literary genres, widely supposed to illuminate the study of the individual and his or her personal circumstances. Missing Persons suggests that auto/biography is, in fact, based on fictions, both about the person and about what it is possible to know about any one individual. Organised into chapters which consider particular kinds of auto/biographical writing, such as work on the British Royal Family and auto/biographies of twentieth-century men, this book demonstrates the absences and evasions - indeed the `missing persons - of auto/biography. Mary Evans' book will provide invaluable reading for students of womens studies, sociology and cultural studies courses. |
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acceptance achieved Algren Alice Kaplan ambiguities Angelica Garnett apparent assumptions auto auto/biography Beauvoir's autobiography became become behaviour Bell Jar biography Bloomsbury group bourgeois Brideshead Revisited British Royal Family childhood construction conventional crucial culture Daddy discussion dominant Dutiful Daughter Edward VIII emerges emotional example existence expectations experience Faber fantasies father female feminine feminism fiction gender genre George Orwell Germaine Greer Harmondsworth hero heterosexual homosexual human idea identified identity individual inevitable intellectual Jan Morris John Osborne Kenneth Rose King Larkin and Osborne literal literary literature lives London male Memoirs modern monarchy moral Morris mother narrative novels organised Orwell's particular Penguin person Philip Larkin political possibilities Prince problematic Queen Victoria reality recognised refusal relations relationship revelation Sartre Sartre's Second Sex Second World sense sexual Simone de Beauvoir social society suggest Sylvia Plath tion twentieth century understanding Victorian Windsors woman women Woolf writing