The introduction to the special issue “Performing Selves in the 21^st Century” discusses the turbulent changes that both the theory and practice of life writing have undergone in recent decades, as well as the sociocultural and media context of contemporary autobiographical and autofictional storytelling. It also surveys the papers included in this issue, which, in their different ways, expose and analyze the strong inclination of 21^st-century self-representation acts towards self-performance and self-invention.

In the new millennium, new media have made conscious self-performance an everyday and continuous activity. Memory has always been creative, but in the digital age it is becoming more commonplace to actively shape pictorial and verbal stories of oneself according to what one wishes to remember and show to the world. Many autofictional books explore the boundary and the overlap between memory, self-presentation, and self-invention, often through protagonists whose acts of writing appear to affect the lives they lead. This article argues that a new autofictional form turns the fluidity, mutability, and collaborative nature of self-presentation into a structural principle. It shows how Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010/2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) critically explore the potentials and dangers of new media ecologies, suggesting that self and world can be changed through acts of (self-)presentation. The article also addresses the question of how autofictional destabilizations of reality relate to concepts such as “alternative facts” and proclamations of a “post-factual” age, and reflects on political and ethical implications of how autofictional texts challenge the belief in uniform and universal truth.

December 2024: Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative “Literature, Cognition, and Emotions,” and teaches Anglophone and comparative literature. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published articles and book chapters on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature, postcolonial literature, and testimonial writing. As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.”

In recent years one has observed the rise of new forms of (self-)life-storying, not only as a means of expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the turn-of-the-21^st-century auto/biographical boom but also as a manifestation of the crisis of both the auto/biographical self and form. These new self-narratives ostensibly resist the canonical “laws” of auto/biographical writing yet eagerly embrace real events from the authors’ lives. This article discusses one of the most acclaimed examples of 21^st-century (self-)life-storying, Rachel Cusk’s “Fay” trilogy — Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018). Drawing on Cusk’s archival records, it focusses on the way Cusk’s auto/biographical authorial self becomes first fictionalized and then compartmentalized into the series’ fictional characters. By referring to Clair Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012), this essay argues that Cusk’s trilogy should be recognized as employing the strategy of “delegated performances,” where the narrativization of the self is dependent on “outsourcing” the authorial self. This strategy is here seen as a signpost of new autofiction.

December 2024.  Robert Kusek (Ph.D, D.Litt) is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Faculty of Philology, as well as Head of Research Centre for Transnational Literary Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, queer heritage, as well as a comparative and transnational approach to literary studies. He is the author of two monographs and several dozen articles published in books and academic journals. He was a researcher in a number of Polish and international projects – currently he is a principal investigator in the National Science Centre funded project entitled “(Un)accidental Tourists: Polish Literature and Visual Culture in South Africa in the 20th and 21st Centuries.”

This article discusses the changing understanding and practice of autofiction in the broader cultural context of the transformations of lived reality, the media landscape, and ways of writing and reading life stories. Originally defined as an autobiographical narrative breaking the conventions of classical autobiography, autofiction and its meaning change as notions of autobiography and the autobiographical loosen. The article suggests that a signaled autofictional intent and deliberate ambiguity of framing are important markers of contemporary autofiction. The second part of the article analyzes the strategies of such signaling in Czech writer Jan Němec’s Ways of Writing about Love (2019). It demonstrates how this work underlines the performative nature of self-representation by commenting on the process of self-narration and self-invention as well as by enacting a patchwork identity through inserting other texts and playful touches into the narrative. By allowing new media to influence the form of the book and by transcending the boundaries of the text to continue his self-performance in other media, Němec probes the possibilities not just of “writing about love” but also of performing the self. The work thus exemplifies autofiction’s tendency to respond to sociocultural developments, including changing patterns of life storytelling.

December 2024: Zuzana Fonioková is Assistant Professor in the Department of Czech Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Her research interests include narrative theory, life writing, autofiction, and autobiographical comics. She is author of Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration (2015) and Od autobiografie k autofikci: Narativní strategie vyprávění o vlastním životě (From autobiography to autofiction: Narrative strategies of life narratives, 2024). She is co-editor of Narrative Inquiry special issue “Life Storytelling across Media and Contexts” (2025).

The study examines two autofictional narratives — The Seventh Autobiography (2000) and The Eight, or Unfinished Autobiography (2007) by the Czech writer Ota Filip (1930–2018). The texts were written in reaction to a media scandal as well as some traumatic events in the author’s private life. The study attempts to understand the different ways in which the two texts were received, both in the Czech context and when compared to the reactions to the German version, Der siebente Lebenslauf (2001). The cognitive-hermeneutic theory of autobiography and autofiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes is the basis of my analysis of textual and paratextual clues that allow reading the Autobiographies in different cognitive frames, or in the evaluation framework of “five worlds” as presented by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. An intepretation of Filip’s works within the concept of the “Inspired World” is also related to the context of Czech autofiction literature (Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Bohumil Hrabal).

December 2024: Jan Tlustý is an associate professor in the Department of Czech Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, as well as in the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He serves as chief editor of the scholarly journal Bohemica Litteraria. His research focuses on interpretation and aesthetic experience, particularly from the perspectives of phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive science and Czech poststructuralism (studies on Jan Patočka, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Milan Jankovič, and others). He is the author of Příliš hlučná prázdnota: Mezery, otřesy a smysl literárního díla, 2022 (Too loud an emptiness: Gaps, shaking, and meaning in works of literature). His research also extends to autofiction in Czech and world literatures (studies on Bohumil Hrabal, Ota Filip, and John Maxwell Coetzee) and to the work of literary scholar Zdeněk Kožmín.

The paper examines how telling someone else’s life story, especially if this person is a close relative, sheds light on the author him- or herself or at least invites readers to wonder about the author’s relationship to the person whose life is told. The text analyzed is Jeannette Walls’s “true-life novel” Half Broke Horses, in which the author has her grandmother tell her own life in the first person. Drawing on research about narratives of vicarious experience, “fictional contamination” in life storytelling, and “narrator and disclosure functions” discussed in the context of unreliable narration, the paper unravels some of the ambivalences and conflicting (self-)images created in the text and explores the effects that such narrative choices might have on readers’ interpretations and how they create “resonance.”

December 2024. Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn. She has published widely on socionarratology, autobiography, oral history, medicine and literature, the medical humanities, dialogue, second-person narration, audionarratology and radio drama. Recent publications include Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity  (De Gruyter 2023) and the edited collections Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama  (Ohio State University Press 2021), Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice  (Oxford University Press 2023) and Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill 2024).

The central problem of post-secular literary criticism is conversion, understood as a turn to various forms of spirituality beyond the traditional, canonical forms of religiosity. This article examines conversion threads in narratives that combine autobiographical and phantasmal selves. The analyzed texts reveal an interplay of fictionality and referentiality that leads to fundamental life changes for the selves. The paper comments on selected works by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Annie Ernaux, and Andrzej Stasiuk. It also indicates analogies between literary conversions and the philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk.

December 2024: Jacek Bielawa holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Silesia (Katowice). His research interests focus on the intersections of life writing, Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self and Peter Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics. His recent publications include articles on Polish autofiction in “Czas Kultury,” “Autobiografia,” and “Romanoslavica.” He is currently conducting a research project titled “Autofictional Conversions and the Central European Identity in the Works of Waldemar Bawołek, Marek Bieńczyk and Andrzej Stasiuk,” financed by the National Science Centre, Poland.

The article inquires into the place and function of autobiography in today’s “hypermnesic” (Hayles) social, medial, and cultural situation. It discusses Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Day, Fidget, and The Ideal Lecture, which hardly anyone reads as autobiographical texts. In a self-reflective and quasi-theoretical manner Goldsmith opens the question of a “life record,” pointing at the medium of language and its performance, and at the media in a technological sense. In an attempt to theorize the way digitization changes the possibilities of subjectivizing the lived, experienced presence and human memory, this study relies on the concept of “tertiary retention” (Stiegler) and problematizes the notion of memory and “archive.” It also points at “ideality” or “utopia,” as used in Goldsmith’s The Ideal Lecture, in light of the problem of language as a memory device and the inherently temporal narrative structure we are used to give to our lives.

December 2024:  Miroslav Kotásek is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. After studying English and Czech languages and literatures, he devoted his Ph.D. thesis to the topic of self-referentiality, especially in narrative texts. Despite dealing with the topic primarily within a literary theoretical framework, this research has led him to broader questions of media borders and capabilities, the relationship between fiction and “reality,” and the domains of affect and performance. In his university courses or in his writing he struggles with these topics ever since, adding culture theory and the study of popular culture to the mix. Nowadays he is mainly concerned with the representation of Holocaust and the role of memory in general, the study of autobiography (life-writing), and the construction of the future in different discourses. He is also active as a translator of non-fiction (e.g. Frank Kermode, Hayden White, Dick Hebdige).

In Bleak House (1852–1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Charles Dickens draws analogies between human beings and bees, which function as an important means to address social and moral problems of Victorian society. This article shows how references to bees expose the hedonistic version of psychological egoism represented by Skimpole’s drone philosophy in Bleak House and how Dickens attacks the evils of insatiable greed underlying the ideology of the middle-class “economic man” implied by the worker-bee analogy in Our Mutual Friend. I argue that the Mandevillian tension between private interests and public benefits underlies Dickens’s allegorical representation of bees.

September 2024: Houliang Chen is a Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research primarily revolves around Victorian literature and culture, with a special focus on the works of Charles Dickens. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Dickens Quarterly, The Dickensian, Textual Practice, and English Studies. He has also published widely in most of the leading journals in Chinese. 

This article reads Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World as a portrayal of two societies, one primitive and the other futuristic, founded on taboos. Although the two contradictory worlds survive on opposite taboos, the study argues that the social and psychic mechanisms behind the operation of taboos in the Savage Reservation and in the World State are structurally similar. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Julia Kristeva, the article examines Huxley’s narrative of taboos in terms of the dialectic of desire and law.

September 2024: Seda Arikan is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English Language and Literature, Fırat University, Turkey. She studied as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, London, in 2012. Her fields are comparative literature, philosophy and literature, ecology and literature, gender studies. She has published three monographs in Turkish: Iris Murdoch’s Novels in the Light of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Method (2014); Cefer Cabbarlı: (Non)Reflections in the Mirror (2019), winner of the Cefer Cabbarlı Award in Azerbaijan (2019), and Doris Lessing: A Philosophy of Life from Marxism to Sufism (2018), which in 2020 was selected as the best monograph of the year on English Literature by English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey. She is currently serving as the vice president of the Doris Lessing Society. A monograph based on her postdoctoral study (at Fordham University, New York) on “Virtue Ethics in the Novels of Doris Lessing” is forthcoming from Routledge.  

The article addresses the erotically conditioned metamorphoses of the female image in the phantasmatic space of three short stories by Algirdas Landsbergis (1924–2004), in which identity is transformed into an expression of creative fantasy and primal needs. The article analyzes sensations and drives in terms of origin and expression. The analysis focuses on the erotic construction and modification of the body according to the needs of the fantasizer. In the three stories, while the male character experiences desire, his mind conjures up a metamorphosis of the desired body, turning it into a sexual provocation, a physical space for erotic action, revealing the inner workings of the fantasizer’s self.

September 2024: Domantė Vaišvylaitė is a PhD student in Lithuanian Literary Studies at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Lithuanian Philology and Advertising, with a thesis on “The Image and Symbolism of Paradise in Travel Literature by Antanas Vaičiulaitis.” Master’s degree in Public Discourse Linguistics, thesis topic “Pandemic Rhetoric: Perception of Threat in The Facebook Social Media Comments.” The PhD thesis is titled “Archetype as a Link between Consciousness and the Unconscious in the Works of Algirdas Landsbergis”. Her research interests are in the fields of memory, mythology, archetypes, phenomenology, experience and trauma in Lithuanian literature. Her experience includes participation in international conferences, work with students, and developing creative projects. 

Contact: domante.vaisvylaite@knf.vu.lt, Vilnius university Kaunas faculty, Muitinės St. 8, 44280 Kaunas, Lithuania
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2663-7320

Gabija Bankauskaitė is a professor of the Institute of Languages, Literature, and Translation Studies at Kaunas Faculty, Vilnius University. Her research interests include modernist discourses of culture and literature, Lithuanian literature of the first half of the 20^th century, and the First Lithuanian Republic’s press and advertising. She is the author numerous articles, of monographs (in Lithuania) such as Balys Sruoga – Traditional and Contemporary Conception (2007), Stefania Jabłońska: Woman at the Turn of Two Centuries (2020), of studies in language teaching, and of textbooks. She is Editor-in-chief of the international journal Respectus Philologicus published by Vilnius University and the Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce (Poland). 

Contact: gabija.bankauskaite@knf.vu.lt, Vilnius university Kaunas faculty, Muitinės St. 8, 44280 Kaunas, Lithuania

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3276-8159

This introduction considers the perhaps unorthodox pairing of secularism and poetry and explores their relationship during the 19^th century. It surveys the Forum’s five essays, which consider how secularism’s multiplicities were negotiated in 19^th-century poetry and how the formal affordances of poetry itself contributed to secularist beliefs, emphasizing national cultural differences as well as points of connection.

Founded in 1831, Abner Kneeland’s freethought newspaper The Boston Investigator was a thorn in the side of Boston’s elite for decades, providing what amounted to a “weekly national correspondence school” to middle-class readers all over the US (French 215). However, while Kneeland’s paper gained attention with controversial articles on subjects such as atheism, labor, and birth control, what is often overlooked is its frequent printing of freethought poetry. In the context of prolific evangelical publications featuring poems aimed at converting and ridiculing infidels, The Boston Investigator published poetry that challenged religious orthodoxy and opened up a space for creative ideological and aesthetic experimentation. This paper examines the freethought poetry in Kneeland’s newspaper and explores its role in questioning religious authority and nourishing heterodox counter-publics in Jacksonian America.

September 2024: Michael Keller is an Assistant Professor of English at Columbus State Community College, where he teaches courses in literature and composition.  He has also taught at Quincy University and the University of Bergen, Norway, where he was a Fulbright Professor.  His previous scholarship has engaged the works of freethought poets, as well as the works of Charles Brockden Brown, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Jones Very.  Most recently, he has been researching the phenomenon of religious cruelty in early American literature.

This essay examines poems about cremation written by adherents of both 19^th-century German bourgeois initiatives to reintroduce cremation and the early 20^th-century German proletarian freethought movement. Supporters of these currents held secularist views. Cremation poems can be considered a laboratory of secularism in which certain secularist truths and beliefs could be formulated and expressed in compelling ways. Notably, these poems fleshed out secularism by paying particular attention to its emotional aspects. The poems discussed point to the existence of a secularist, cremationist emotional community across class and temporal boundaries. The essay contributes to the study of secularist mentalities and convictions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, probing the role of poetry in establishing secularist themes and positions.

September 2024: Carolin Kosuch is a historian with research interests in Jewish history, secularism, anarchism and intellectual history. After holding positions at Leipzig’s Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and the German Historical Institute in Rome, she completed her habilitation project on secularism and death in Western modernities at the chair of Rebekka Habermas, University of Göttingen, in summer 2023. She teaches courses in 19^th and 20^th century transnational history, the history of gender, technology and Jewish history. Her work was funded by the German Research Foundation. Since winter term 2023/24, she represents the chair of Rebekka Habermas (December 2023) at the University of Göttingen.

The poetry in British freethought periodicals in the second half of the 19^th century illuminates how members of this radical secularist movement agitated for change, expressed their ideas, and self-fashioned their collective identity as a community of thought and action. This article examines the role of poetry in the National Reformer, Freethinker, Secular Review/Agnostic Journal, and Secular Chronicle. Their editors published lyrical and reflective poetry alongside poems of protest, expressing freethinkers’ social and political struggles across poetic forms and bringing an often-divided secularist movement together. The article concludes by considering what cuttings in an edition of J. M. Wheeler’s Freethought Readings and Secular Songs (1892) tells us about the value of poetry for secularists.

September 2024: Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She primarily works on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and their periodicals but has a wider interest in literary responses to esoteric spiritualities and intellectual history. Her book, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published by Peter Lang in 2019. She co-edited the Routledge volume Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs with Naomi Hetherington (2020). Her articles have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Media History, and elsewhere.

The poet and woman of letters Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) achieved her early fame — and notoriety — as a radical freethinker, especially as a translator and champion of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (1873), which articulates an antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism. Her subsequent prose works — essays, reviews, and translations — confirmed this reputation. But her verse, which makes use of what her beloved poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam called “a subtler language within language,” speaks in a subjective non-polemical voice. Focusing on the poetry Blind published in a range of Victorian periodicals, including Dark Blue, the Athenaeum, Black and White, and The Savoy, this essay argues that these poems express the tension between materialism and idealism that characterize her poetry as a whole, while also illuminating the complex dynamics of secularism in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras.

September 2024: James Diedrick, Professor Emeritus of English at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (University of Virginia Press, 2016); editor of Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (MRHA, 2021); co-editor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); and author of Understanding Martin Amis, University of South Carolina Press (first edition, 1995; revised and expanded edition, 2004). He has published articles on Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Mathilde Blind, Elizabeth Pennell, Henry Ashbee, Ring Lardner, J.G. Ballard, and Martin Amis. He is currently at work on a project analyzing affinities and convergences between Gladstonian liberalism and the New Woman movement in late-century British culture.