Literary Disability: Autobiography and Novel at Mid-Century

Abstract

Because the borders between nonfiction and fiction are very permeable, this chapter analyzes as life writing three autobiographical texts that are narrated through the third person and circumvent many of the rhetorical signposts of nonfiction. In all three, literary style is of primary concern. The experimental language and structure of Christy Brown’s Down All the Days and Christopher Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock offer possibilities neither writer saw in autobiography as they understood it. Stewart Parker never sought publication of Hopdance, nor even finished the book, and thus the circumstances of its composition, like the volatile subject matter of Brown’s Down All the Days, require a discussion of the ethics of privacy and disclosure in writing about one’s own body and that of another.