Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin

Aesthetic Autobiography fills a gap in autobiography studies by uncovering the aesthetics of a hazy subgenre of the autobiographical novel of the early 20th century. Using Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf as her models, with Anais Nin in their wake, Nalbantian uncovers a common aesthetics of the manipulation of life facts into fiction which in turn sheds light on the creative process. She focuses on an aspect of the self, transposed into narrative, which surpasses the personal or cultural and which she identifies as the aesthetic.