Publication scheduled for Fall 2019…

“Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing:  Narrative and Intimacy” is a study of multimodal narrativity in modernist and late modernist life writing about couplehood, love, marriage, and desire (under contract with Bloomsbury).

Exploring life writing by literary couples such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janine Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the importance of ethics to our understanding of relationality in the modern period. Examining a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, the book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.