The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism

Authors

Pamela L. Caughie, Loyola University ChicagoFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2013

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Woolf’s fantastic novel, Orlando (1928), is more true to the experience of transsexualism than is the allegedly authentic account provided in Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who, as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the first transsexual. Orlando reconfigures notions not just of gender but of time, history, and the very nature of life-writing itself, producing a new model of life writing that I call a transgenre.

Comments

Author Posting. © Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. This article is posted here by permission of the Purdue Research Foundation for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 59, Issue 3, Fall 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2013.0042

Recommended Citation

Caughie, P. "The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism." Modern Fiction Studies 59(3), 2013.

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Copyright Statement

© Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.