Developments in autofictional genre signals: Nouns, pronouns and authorial attachment

Abstract

Autofiction is characterized by ambiguation of generic conventions. While postmodern autofictional texts often explicitly comment on genre, much autofiction avant-la-lettre merges generic modes more subtly, namely through narrative structure and style. The article argues that, therefore, in the exploration of autofiction in a diachronic perspective, consideration of stylistic and narratological details is particularly important, and it outlines developments in autofiction al literature by discussing how three autofictional precursors from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century create generic ambiguity. Henry Fielding, writing before categories of autobiography and novel were properly established, prefaces his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) with comments on the kind of truth it offers by way of rendering autobiographical experiences in artistically crafted form. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writing within the nineteenth century’s much more firmly established genre frames, does not comment on these, but, through pronoun ambiguation and structural elements, imbues the first-person account of the eponymous character of Aurora Leigh (1856) with autobiographical layers of meaning. As part of more explicit challenges to genre conventions from around the turn of the century, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) comments on generic hybridity and experiments with first-person attachment, third-person distancing, and stylistic abstraction. From tracing continuities and differences in how these texts create ambiguity about autobiographical and fictional modes and meanings, this article draws conclusions about attempts to define autofiction and about the role of stylistic analysis in understanding genres diachronically. On the one hand, the article demonstrates that autofiction cannot be defined on the basis of formal and stylistic features alone; on the other, it shows that narratological and stylistic analysis, set against the background of generic transformations in the literary landscape more generally, enables a better understanding of how autofiction works in combination with as well as in opposition to established conventions.