The Distinction of Autofiction

This scholarly volume challenges prevailing assumptions about autofiction, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding its identity, status, and unique position within English-language literary production. While autofiction is often discussed in terms of its hybridity or through imported theories, this book addresses the conspicuous lack of definition in English-language criticism. Drawing on autobiography and fictionality studies, post-postmodern art theories, debates on authorship, epistemology, and insights from postcolonial and queer studies, the author proposes a genre-based model that accounts for autofiction’s combinatory nature, intermediate position in the genre system, and formal diversity.

Focusing on canonical late 20th-century authors alongside emerging voices from marginalized groups, the book rejects universalizing perspectives, instead grounding autofiction in Western literary traditions. It argues that autofiction’s narrative experiments highlight the nuanced distinction between authenticity and artifice, while exploring the real-life effects of fiction as a tool for self-exploration. By defining autofiction as an ontologically and generically complex, author-centered form, the monograph enables readers to identify autofictional works more effectively, bypassing debates about truthfulness. It also illuminates the unique affordances of autofiction, showcasing how individual authors leverage the form to navigate identity, selfhood, and the boundaries between reality and fiction.