Romance of Failure First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James

This book focuses on the intense intimacy between author and first-person narrator in the fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James: the narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of his tale, at once hero and historian. Auerbach defends the beleaguered 'I' in these works against the depersonalizing tendencies of post-structuralism. In reaffirming the importance of the human subject for the study of narrative, Auerbach shows how the first-person form, in particular,underscores fundamental problems of literary representation: how fictions come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.Auerbach, Jonathan is the author of 'Romance of Failure First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James' with ISBN 9780195057218 and ISBN 019505721X.