‘A rich contribution to the study of autobiography.’ - James Olney Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Proust, Joyce, Woolf, with Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterised by a common aesthetics. She discovers in these writings a threshold of artistic transformation beyond the identification of biographical authenticity.