My Father and Myself: J. R. Ackerley’s Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman

While mainstream modernist (auto)biographical texts separate the Victorian age from modernity by the forceful impact of the Oedipal rebellion, J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself demonstrates that the two ages are drawn together by transgressive father-son desire. The memoir challenges heteronormative masculinity, and belongs to the separate subgenre: the queer Künstlerroman.