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"If I had acted differently, then ..." Most human beings indulge in counterfactual thought experiments at one point or another. For the fictional characters analysed in this book, they are a central preoccupation. The characters obsessively review their past, looking at a road they did not take, pondering on a life they did not live. Drawing on narratology, theories of counterfactuality and the study of motifs, the book suggests a typology of unlived lives, which is based on more than fifty works from the nineteenth century to the present. In addition, the book offers seven readings. These focus on texts in which the motif of the unlived life features in an especially characteristic or challenging manner: Henry James's "The Diary of a Man of Fifty" and "The Jolly Corner," Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway," Vita Sackville-West's "All Passion Spent," Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Alice Munro's "Carried Away" and "Dolly."--Back cover.

Self in literature. --- 1800-1999

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Offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation. The stories considered in this book range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They describe a human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, authenticity, memory, and more.

Impersonation in literature. --- Self in literature.

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In Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects. The morality play is allegorical drama, a "theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed--constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life. This fascinating look at the genre of the morality play will be of keen interest to scholars of medieval drama and to those interested in late medieval culture, sacramentalism, penance and confession, the history of the self, and theater and performance.

Self In Literature --- Moralities --- Literary Criticism --- Self in literature --- Literary criticism

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Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood-what constitutes a self-have changed over time, so too have ideas about how to represent, shape, or invade the self. The authors show that, since the Renaissance, changes in observation strategies have driven innovations in literature; literature, in turn, has provided a laboratory and forum for the way we think about surveillance and privacy. Ultimately, they contend that the habits of mind cultivated by literature make rational and self-aware participation in contemporary surveillance environments possible. In a society increasingly dominated by interlocking surveillance systems, these habits of mind are consequently necessary for fully realized liberal citizenship.

Self in literature. --- Privacy in literature. --- Citizenship in literature.

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Self in literature. --- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, --- Criticism and interpretation.