Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the engagement with and representation of the face across literature, photography, and theatre. It looks at how the face is an active agent, closely connected with the history of the media and the social interactions reflected in media images. Focusing on the dynamic period of the interwar years, it explores a range of case studies in Poland, UK, and the US, and examines artists like Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Virginia Woolf, Debora Vogel, Sir Cecil Beaton, Theodore Wladyslaw Benda, and Edward Gordon Craig. Teresa Brus argues that these writers and photographers defended the face against threats from modern life – not least, the media. She focuses on transformations of the face in life writing across a range of media and draws attention to the artists’ autobiographical narratives. Teresa Brus is Associate Professor in the Institute of English Studies at Wroclaw University, Poland. She has published onvarious aspects of life writing and photography in journals, including Biography, European Journal of Life Writing, Prose Studies, and Connotations. She is the author of Life Writing as Self-Collecting in the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice (2012).