Selected Twentieth Century Anglo-Irish Autobiographies: Theory and Patterns of Self-Representation

Overview

For the Anglo-Irish community, the establishment of the Irish Free State after a sequence of wars was a collectively traumatic experience. This book traces the personal conflicts and ideological positions of this class as they unfold in a wide range of autobiographies. The study analyses the texts against broad cultural and literary contexts and shows what strategies authors use in order to construct their public personae. Moreover, it provides an up-to-date guideline for the main assumptions of autobiographical theory, with a special focus on the Anglo-Irish subform.