Novel Lives

Following an introduction to the theory of autobiographical rhetoric, this study centers on the process of fictionalizing the self in Cabrera Infante's La Habana para un infante difunto and Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia y el escribidor. Rosemary Feal examines narrative devices that the self-conscious protagonists employ to translate life into text, and further demonstrates how they create mock autobiographies. The analysis of the autobiographical mode reaches beyond the texts in question, to encompass related forms of storytelling including the picaresque, cinema, soap operas, and erotica, and other works by the authors that are the book's focus.