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The story so far: the term autofiction is said to have been coined by Serge Doubrovsky, who used it to describe his 1977 novel Fils, where he defines it-fairly broadly-as Fiction, of strictly factual events and facts: autofiction, if you will" [Fiction, d'événements et de faits strictement réels; si l'on veut, autofiction].1 While initially associated with postmodernist French novelists such as Doubrovsky himself, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert, Marie Darrieussecq, or Catherine Millet, it has come to acquire a broader use, to describe various combinations of the autobiographical and the fictional. That broader use includes its Anglicized form, autofiction," reflecting the widespread appearance of such hybrid works in Anglophone literature too. As Armine Mortimer put it, Autofiction is front and center right now and shows no signs of giving up its ostentatious primacy, both among creative writers and critical and interpretive theorists" (22).
Autofiction has certainly attracted a great deal of critical attention in twenty-first century criticism, especially criticism discussing works of postmodernism of the late twentieth century, but there has also been a turn to works of modernism in the earlier twentieth century, seeing them as precursors to postmodern autofiction.2 This is in many ways a welcome development, though it sometimes risks anachronism and insularity. My recent work has focused on the diversity of such hybrid forms not just in modernism but over the long turn of the century, from about 1870 to about 1930. The present essay proposes a more extended theoretical lexicon for the analysis of the proliferation of such hybrids in modern literature.3
That is, autofiction" gets used to cover several different kinds of work. Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabon distinguish between two types of autofictional novels: those which contain true facts presented in the style of a novel, and those which serve to fuse memories with the imaginary" (De Meyer and Stewart 23). Zhao Yiheng finds four distinct types:
1. "Autobiography in the form of a novel"
2. The "pseudo-autobiographical novel" (such as Proust's, in which though narrator, character and author are all identified, other characters do not correspond exactly to real counterparts)
3. The "para-autobiographical novel"; written in the third person, with the narrator implicit, so the central character is the focaliser
4. Autofiction in the "strict sense",...