Image of a Man: The Journal of Keith Vaughan by Alex Belsey

'I want to know what I am, what I want, what I can do, what is real, what is lovely.' The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912–77) was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan's identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focusing on Vaughan's journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the 'artist' persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture - and the opportunities afforded by journal and diary forms to make such constructions possible. Alex Belsey is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Life Writing Research (CLWR) at King's College London, researching and writing on diary and journal forms, experimental auto/biography, and autofiction.

Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

What happens when novelists write about their own lives directly, in memoirs and autobiographies, rather than in novels? How do they present themselves, and what do their self-portraits reveal? In a series of biographical case studies, Portraits from Life examines how seven canonical Modernist writers - Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, H.G. Wells, and Edith Wharton - depicted themselves in their memoirs and autobiographies during the first half of the twentieth-century. Drawing on a range of life-writing sources in this innovative group portrait, Jerome Boyd Maunsell reconstructs the periods during which these authors worked on their memoirs, often towards the end of their lives, and shows how memoirs and autobiographies are just as artful as novels. The seven portraits in the book also create a rich network of encounters, as many of these writers knew each other, and wrote about each other in their reminiscences. Portraits from Life investigates the difficulties and possibilities of autobiography - the relation of fact and fiction, biography and autobiography; the ethical issues of dealing with real people; the thin generic lines between novels and autobiographies; and the deceptive workings of memory - and how all these writers dealt with these concerns as they looked back on their lives. An act of portraiture and biography as well as an act of criticism, moving from London to Paris and through two world wars, it also pieces together a fresh and constantly inter-connecting narrative of the Modernist era in England and France.

• Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography.

Susan Sontag by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

'My idea of a writer: someone interested in "everything"', declared Susan Sontat (1933-2004). Essayist, diarist, filmmaker, novelist and playwright, her own life seemed to match this ideal. As well as writing in an unusually broad array of genres, Sontag wrote about a startling range of topics - from literature, dance, film and painting to cancer, AIDS, and the ethics of war reportage. Few have captured the twentieth century in the same manner. In this new biography Jerome Boyd Maunsell assesses the astonishing scope of Sontag's life and work, tracing her growth during her academic career at Chicago, Oxford, the Sorbonne and Harvard, through her marriage to Philip Rieff at the age of seventeen, to the birth of her son David and her relationships with women. From Sontag's literary life in New York to her diagnosis of cancer in the mid-1970s and her miraculous rebirth as a novelist and critic in the 1980s and '90s, this biography puts intellectual development hand-in-hand with the personal, providing an integrated picture of Sontag as private person and public figure. Drawing on her extensive diaries, Susan Sontag gives a far more intimate portrait than has been previously possible of Sontag's struggles in love, in marriage, as a mother and as a writer. It offers an essential re-evaluation of a pivotal figure that is of interest to anyone concerned with literary history or culture.

• Susan Sontag by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

Literature and the Rise of the Interview by Rebecca Roach

Today interviews proliferate everywhere: in newspapers, on television, and in anthologies; as a method they are a major tool of medicine, the law, the social sciences, oral history projects, and journalism; and in the book trade interviews with authors are a major promotional device. We live in an 'interview society'. How did this happen? What is it about the interview form that we find so appealing and horrifying? Are we all just gossips or is there something more to it? What are the implications of our reliance on this bizarre dynamic for publicity, subjectivity, and democracy? Literature and the Rise of the Interview addresses these questions from the perspective of literary culture. The book traces the ways in which the interview from has been conceived and deployed by writers, and interviewing has been understood as a literary-critical practice. It excavates what we might call a 'poetics' of the interview from and practice. In doing so it covers 150 years and four continents. It includes a diverse rostrum of well-known writers, such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, William Burroughs, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison, while reintroducing some individuals that history has forgotten, such as Betty Ross, 'Queen of Interviewers', and Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's profligate son. Together these stories expose the interview's position in the literary imagination and consider what this might tell us about conceptions of literature, authorship, and reading communities in modernity.

• Literature and the Rise of the Interview by Rebecca Roach

Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity by Rob Gallagher

This book argues that games offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, videogames are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modelling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.

• Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity by Rob Gallagher

Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786

In this sparkling account, Brant uses the brief moment of balloon madness as a way into a wide-ranging exploration of Enlightenment sensibility in Britain. "All the world is mad about balloons" observers recorded during the craze in Britain that lasted from 1783 to 1786. Excitement about the new invention spread rapidly, inspiring hopes, visions, fashions, celebrations, satires, imaginary heroics and real adventures. In this sparkling account, Brant uses the brief moment of balloon madness as a way into a wide-ranging exploration of Enlightenment sensibility in Britain. She follows the craze as it travelled around the country, spread through crowds and shaped the daily lives and dreams of individuals. From the levity of fashion, political satire and light verse inspired by balloons, she shows how wonders of air and speed also connected with the deeper preoccupations and anxieties of eighteenth-century Britain. An aerial 'view from above' provided new moral perspectives on the place of humans in the universe and the nature of their aspirations; while the success of the French, leaders in aeronautics, unsettled national identity with visions of a new world order. The practical limitations of balloons soon put an end to one set of possibilities, but their effect on popular culture was more enduring, with meaning even today. With a cast including kings, politicians, charlatans, pickpockets, the beau monde, duellists and animals, Balloon Madness celebrates the excitement and fun of this brief but world-changing episode of history and its long afterlife in our imagination. CLARE BRANT is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King's College London.

• Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786

Rupert Brooke in the First World War by Alisa Miller

Rupert Brooke died in April 1915, on the eve of the Gallipoli landings. During the First World War Brooke was the iconic poet-soldier, adored and mimicked by readers and would-be writers - both in and out of uniform - with an international following that has neither been examined nor explained since. The general shift in attitudes toward war and the manner in which the war poets are presented meant that Brooke was recast as the exemplar of pre-war innocence, forever swimming in faintly saccharine, nakedly patriotic streams born of his famous poems. Rupert Brooke in the First World War takes a celebrity of the war who became an idol for fellow writers, politicians, literary elites and the general public, and tells the story of his life and famously romantic death, providing readers a fuller sense not only of the human being and his singular life and circumstances, but also of the world he inhabited, and the passions and tastes of men and women living through a period of great upheaval.

• Rupert Brooke in the First World War

Cher Philippe. A Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune, edited by T. G. Ashplant, Clare Brant and Ioana Luca.

Cher Philippe is a Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune, a distinguished theorist, scholar, author whose work on the autobiographical pact is key for life writing and literary criticism. Likewise his analysis of diaries as a genre and a practice is essential to the field. In the Festschrift, twenty scholars from around the world engage with Lejeune's thinking, show how and why his ideas are so important, and pay tribute in different ways to this delightful scholar.

• Cher Philippe. A Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune