Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.

Hannibal and Scipio left no autobiographies, except that Hannibal in 205, before leaving Italy for Africa, inscribed a bilingual account of his military resources. Scipio’s contemporary funeral elogium (list of his offices and achievements, a kind of succinct obituary) does not survive (a much later one does). This chapter offers, by way of introduction, semi-fictional replacements for these missing documents and explains what Hannibal’s full inscription is likely to have contained. Other first-person evidence by the two men is quoted and discussed, such as letters reported in the literary sources. The chapter closes by asking what Hannibal and Scipio looked like. Appendix 1.1 lists and evaluates the sources for the book, and there is a sub-section on reliability of speeches. Appendix 1.2 addresses the problem of whether Plutarch’s lost Life of Scipio was about Hannibal’s opponent or Scipio Aemilianus, his younger relative by adoption. Appendix 1.3 is about ‘roving anecdotes’.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

This chapter traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.

Chapter 4 considers the project of worldmaking and the concept of personality from the perspective of two prose genres that dominated Yeats’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiography and occult philosophy. My justification for bringing these genres together lies in an understanding of how they are used in his exploration of personality and aesthetic Bildung. The logic of misrecognition can be discerned not only in Yeats’s growing understanding of the self/anti-self dichotomy but also in the the process by which he learns, at the hands of sometimes deceptive instructors, the secrets of the spirit world. Yeats’s spiritual journey in A Vision frames a cosmic system in which personality, understood as a dialectics of self and anti-self, defines many of the historical figures who exemplify the phases of the moon. In Autobiographies, he becomes increasingly aware of the need to document his own personality with the rectifying aim of discovering the “age-long memoried self” that coexists with his ordinary “daily self” (Au 216). Each text creates in its own fashion the contours and atmosphere of a world in which the past – on the one hand, through recollection; on the other, through an understanding of the historical gyres – retains its vitality and presentness.

The recent wave of visual material studies in modernist poetics warrants renewed consideration of the means by which Lowell engaged, resisted, and reflected on photographic practices. Lowell’s photographic modes vary with shifting styles and subjects. Early in his career, Lowell invokes photographs and snapshots as material artifacts in portrait and self-portrait genres. In this mode, the surface of the photograph collects descriptive details that rhetorically situate the “record of a life” as one that, Lowell insists, must be believed to be “true,” and “real,”although obviously manipulated. Photography also functions as a metaphor for putting the photographic looking “on stage” to examine different ways of seeing. In later work, epistemologies of photography become models for the action of poetic autobiography and for performances of writing. Connections between photography and poetic practice are considered in autobiographical prose and major poems in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.

Robert Lowell’s influence has been pervasive. Two features of his writing, in particular, have been widely adopted and adapted: photographic imagery and the practice of quoting. Lowell’s photographic realism is the central trope in his autobiographical writing, and it became a lingua franca of the confessional and post-confessional poem in general. The influence appears in such later poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Frank Bidart. Lowell’s practice of inserting quoted texts and conversational tidbits by others within his own imaginative structures is a second highly influential feature of his writing. His method of sampling influenced or aligns with the work of such later poets as Bidart, Henri Cole, and Claudia Rankine. Lowell’s use of mimetic repetition (the photograph, the quote) continue to resonate in the way we write poetry and read it.

After a short discussion of the actual typescripts and manuscripts of Lowell’s letters, this chapter centers on the published books of letters, which have become a central, rewarding part of Lowell’s oeuvre. On the level of style, Lowell’s letters can help us hear the poems better: above all, they make audible the comic tones under-recognized in his poetry. On the level of content, the letters shed light on Lowell’s literary contexts, his interests, and his thinking in specific poems: When Lowell writes to other poets about their work, he frequently reveals quite a bit about his own. And finally, the letters create an autobiography that encompasses gossip, complaint, apology, argument, critique, and confession.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

As with practically everything in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, we must consider the colonial context of foreign ‘viewings’ of the Nile Delta. Tourists pulled to the top of the Great Pyramid by Egyptian guides look down on a scene onto which they project their own recent experiences of Egypt and their knowledge of its history. They look, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, with ‘imperial eyes’. When they venture into the landscape of the Delta itself, such as on the sporting trips recommended in Cairo of To-Day, they move through a landscape whose infrastructure and, to a certain extent, socio-economic system are the products of imperialism, and also of Egyptian nation-building in an international, imperial context. In this chapter, I shall explore these themes of modernity and imperialism through a superficially innocent genre of writing – the Euro-American travelogue – and a more overtly political genre – the contemporary Egyptian autobiography. For both, the late 19th and early 20th century Delta is in a sense a place of lost innocence, although they survey its landscape from two very different viewing platforms. The tension between the Delta of the shadūf and the Delta of the railway is always present.

The Prologue offers an autobiographical account of a scholar’s first encounter with Naipaul’s foundational novel, A House for Mr Biswas. It locates the reading of it in a colonial world defined by the arrival of indentured labourers to colonial sugar plantations. It is suggested that a writer needs a constituency, which is often a recognizable society or country that understands him. Likewise a researcher, a scholar, or a critic, too, needs a recognizable writer who, to vary Lionel Trilling’s recall of a phrase by W. H. Auden about “a real book” reading us, reads him or her. A book reads the critic, the scholar, and nowhere is this reciprocity of reading more marked than in someone from V. S. Naipaul’s own sugar plantation diaspora reading him. Important West Indian writers like Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, and Kenneth Ramchand, variously, make the claim that the children of indenture are Naipaul’s best readers. Naipaul himself had observed that his earlier “social comedies” can be “fully appreciated only by someone who knows the region” he writes about. The Prologue ends with the reception of Naipaul upon the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Sæwulf is known only from his fascinating autobiographical account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land around the year 1100 at the time of the First Crusade, which can be compared with such works as Adomnán’s book on the Holy Places and Hugeburc’s account of Willibald’s journey to the Holy Land, both excerpted in Volume One. The excerpt here recounts a storm and Sæwulf’s visit to Bethlehem.