1. Introduction 2. 'Romantic' originality 3. Legitimising appropriation 4. George Eliot, originality, and plagiarism 5. Charles Reade: the realist as plagiarist 6. Aesthetics of salvage in fin-de-siecle: Pater, Wilde, Johnson

In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific 'unprocessed' tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to symptomatic 'flashbacks' endured by victims trauma. Virginia Woolf's compulsive use images sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouac's brothers angels, J. G. Ballard's empty swimming pools, Melville's Narcissus madness my own return blood wounding in work, are part each writer's attempt construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction...

AbstractIn our age the categories of memory, monumentality, and truth telling are all far from stable. In highly charged world what Foucault termed 'parrhesia' – a mode free speech 'linked to courage in face danger' testimony can challenge state's version events autobiographical fictions offer contexts through which trauma might be understood. this essay, I argue that danger instability has come supersaturate concrete textual representations traumatic experience, also link discourses with...

My paper draws on my experience as writer, academic, and director of the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University (CLN). Taking examples from CLN's successful reading research seminars, I will argue that act bringing together academics practioners to debate notions truth-telling, ethical dilemma, representations self like is not only challenging frustrating, it an translation in which something gained well lost. Virginia Woolf (and many writers before since) saw both intellectual...

‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. daresay practised Jacob here; Mrs D shall invent next here …’ So wrote Virginia Woolf her diary 1924. In essay extend Woolf's idea of a writer's journal as practice ground to borderland mediating the public private identities three women whose diaries examine here: Woolf, Katherine Mansfield Louisa May Alcott. major fictions all writers, moreover, we encounter multiple images both mirrors...

Abstract Contemporary critical practice is becoming increasingly self‐reflective, with first person commentary and subjective musings appearing in academic texts produced across disciplines. On the other hand, as number of writing practitioners academy mounts, their works reflect a growing awareness of, engagement with, theoretical debates that surround creative practice. Nowhere this interchange between theory more prevalent, however, than discipline life writing, field concerned forces at...

Recent work in Expressive Telling, an oral form of Writing, has demonstrated the usefulness a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach design narrative therapeutic interventions post-conflict and crisis settings. This paper outlines how combined PAR/relational ethics informed recent Telling project supporting vulnerable families Akkar region Lebanon (2020–21) enabling development strong relational bonds among stakeholders that sustained face Lebanon's social economic upheaval COVID-19...

Abstract ‘ The process of literary influence is a battle between strong equals, father and sons .’ So wrote Harold Bloom in Anxiety Influence . But what daughters? Can Bloom's work offer insights into the dynamics for daughters as well sons? Louisa May Alcott Virginia Woolf were writer‐daughters writer‐fathers who anxiously negotiated familial patriarchy patriarchal history their texts. In examinations power fathers over words daughters, moreover, critics allude explicitly or otherwise to...

Abstract Despite recent controversies over ‘faked’ memoirs, most readers of life writing continue to trust in the autobiographical pact: they believe that memoirs are a source personal truth, writer’s outlet for laying bare past. But some argue codes and conventions memoir inscribe distance between self subject. Before writers able tell truth their readers, moreover, have confront process themselves again. Writers autobiographically based fiction (or autofiction, autobiografiction) long...