Accessibility navigation


Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press

Battershill, C. (2015) Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press. Journal of Modern Literature, 39 (1). pp. 38-54. ISSN 1529-1464

Full text not archived in this repository.

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.38

Abstract/Summary

Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag (1940) are accounts of the authors’ educations in the 1920s. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, these works use reticent narrators to test the limits of autobiography. In each case, authorial self-presentation complicates the work’s classification in the literary marketplace: Green paradoxically extends his use of a pseudonym to autobiography and Isherwood assigns his own name to his purportedly fictional protagonist, and yet Hogarth published both as novels. The two texts and their publication histories exemplify modernist autobiography’s blurring of the lines between fiction and personal history.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
ID Code:39005
Uncontrolled Keywords:christopher isherwood, henry green, book history, autobiography, reticence
Publisher:Indiana University Press

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation