Robert Kusek

The return of life-writing genres, biographical writing in particular, to the heart of present-day literary practices remains one of the most interesting phenomena in contemporary literature written in English. The article discusses a number of narratives (written by biographers, literary critics and novelists) which have emerged in the last decades and which attempt to present and critically analyse the life of Henry James, the master of American fiction at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The author recapitulates on the major trends in contemporary biographical practices which address the life of Henry James – especially the conclusions reached by biographers and critics associated with Marxism, Deconstruction, Feminism and Queer Theory. Moreover, the article investigates the phenomenon of the nearly simultaneous arrival of several biographical novels about Henry James.

Though Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, two Man Booker Prize-winning historical novels by Hilary Mantel, ostensibly deal with the life of Thomas Cromwell, a chief minister to King Henry VIII, their major motif, I should argue, is that of disability, of illness, of bodily failure. As Mantel herself stated in an essay titled Royal Bodies, “historians are still trying to peer inside the Tudors, […] are they healthy, are they sick, can they breed?” She further added: “The story of Henry and his wives is peculiar to its time and place, but also timeless and universally understood; it is highly political and also highly personal. It is about body parts, about what slots in where, and when: are they body parts fit for purpose, or are they diseased?” (Mantel 2013). Bodily dysfunction appears to me to be one of primary thematic preoccupations of Mantel’s writing. Handicapped Muriel from Every Day is Mother’s Day, disfigured “Irish giant” O’Brien from The Giant, O’Brien, ailing Henry VIII from her Tudor triptych – these are just a few of a panoply of disabled/ill/afflicted characters that populate the pages of Mantel’s work.
The aim of the present paper is to examine Mantel’s 2003 memoir entitled Giving Up the Ghost which tells the story of the writer’s struggle with endometriosis as well as doctors’ indifference and medical neglect. I will attempt to discuss Mantel’s autobiographical account not only as a narrative about the writer’s illness, but as a work which investigates interrelatedness of writing and suffering, and which tries to both make sense and take charge of one’s life story which has been otherwise claimed by the demands and limitations of an ailing body. In short, I wish to see Mantel’s memoir as an exercise in autopathography.
 

The paper addresses the issue of an inherited memory of the Great War and traces its manifestations in contemporary (auto)biographical narratives. Two writers’ memoirs, i.e. Christopher Isherwood’s Kathleen and Frank (1971) and Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily, (2008) have been selected for an in-depth analysis which aims to show how the children of the survivors/casualties of the Great War have struggled with – to use Doris Lessing’s expression – “the poison running in [their] veins”, namely with an inherited memory and trauma of the trenches. Most importantly, the paper postulates that literary and cultural studies on postmemory should be expanded, both thematically and generically, and cover the memory of the Great War.