Critical Impressionism: Max Saunders’s Self-Impression and the Portraiture of Life-Writing

Max Saunders’s Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modernism sets about the enormous task of creating a taxonomy of intersections between auto/biographical writing and fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing this, Saunders also strives to transform our understanding of modernist impersonality, literary impressionism, and the various forms of writing about the self. He argues that by exploding generic categories that render life-writing antithetical to fiction, a new understanding of major literary movements and their defining texts is possible. This dilation of genre and period accords with shifting theoretical accounts of the subject and re-historicizes literary experimentation with the possibilities of first-person narrative.