This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

Countering popular assumptions about comics being made for and by men, this chapter begins by offering a brief alternative comics history focusing on women artists, covering comics production from the mainstream to the underground. Taking cues from recent exhibitions on women artists and comics history by women authors and artists, the chapter provides insight into the different contexts and communities, covering political cartoonists and illustrators, mainstream and underground artists.

The second half of the chapter focuses on the graphic novel and examines works by Lynda Barry and a new generation of women comics artists, Ebony Flowers and Weng Pixin. It elaborates on the possibilities of reading the graphic novels in light of the rich history of women artists and comics storytelling, building bridges between individual and collective stories while pointing out the innovations unfolding through drawing, writing, and collage.

This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.

Adam Kelly has persuasively argued that Wallace’s oeuvre should be understood through the prism of New Sincerity, which is to say a late- or post-postmodernist quest to balance cynicism with a return to what Wallace called “single-entendre principles.” While the new sincerity paradigm is not without its critics, sincerity is indisputably central to Wallace’s ethical system, and its personal and authorial challenges provide some of the most compelling moments in his writing. The apparent sincerity of his authorial voice has been one of his most appealing attributes, and Wallace himself commented frequently on the fraught dynamic between author and reader, simultaneously predicated on sincerity and manipulation. This chapter traces the role of sincerity as, on the one hand, a sort of artistic telos for Wallace and, on the other, an endlessly thorny problem that springs up in every facet of contemporary life. The chapter goes on to highlight Wallace’s influence in contemporary fiction, highlighting Karl Ove Knausgaard as an author who explores similar questions.

This chapter argues that generic distinctions between the essay and the novel have historically been difficult to preserve, with many of the supposedly identifying features of each genre applying in practice to the other. The author surveys work by writers including Milan Kundera, Robert Musil, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.

Since the 1970s, autofiction has come to occupy a place somewhere between the novel and autobiography, disturbing the boundaries of both these forms. Given the proliferation of concepts of autofiction, this chapter does not offer a formal definition, but rather a summary of the development of its forms, the intellectual and social conditions that accompanied this development, and its effects in redrawing the literary landscape. Two broad generations of autofictional writers can be observed: the earlier generation participated in an ‘impersonal’ form of writing in the 1950–60s, then a ‘return of the subject’ in the 1970s, including Roland Barthes’s exploration of more subjective writing, Serge Doubrovsky’s invention of the term ‘autofiction’ in 1977, and similar experiments from nouveaux romanciers such as Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The later generation were less marked by the theoretical concerns of their predecessors, and more immersed in the media. Hervé Guibert’s unclassifiable, hybrid works heralded this new generation, and the genre came to greater prominence still with Christine Angot’s work in the 1990s. The dispute between Marie Darrieussecq and Camille Laurens in 2007 illuminates how autofiction had altered the literary landscape, and Chloe Delaume’s work exemplifies some of the latest directions in autofiction.

This chapter considers the forms and functions of feminist writings from life in the twenty-first century, illuminating a perceived shift in the conception of the personal-as-political. Part one addresses recent feminist memoirs which seek to memorialise a period and a collective experience, thereby doing history as autobiography (Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak (2002) and Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007)); it asks how and to what ends past feminisms are narrated and remembered in the present. Part two turns to the emergence of generically inventive and autofictional forms of life writing by women in recent years. Mixing essay, fiction, theory, and autobiography, texts such as Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) and Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (2000) displace the writing ‘I’ via the incorporation and assimilation of various other life stories. I assess the possibilities and limitations of this embrace of empathetic intersubjectivity as an ethical strategy of recent feminist life writing, considering how this reframesin perhaps problematically privatised waysearlier notions of solidarity and collectivity.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.