A Voyage Within: Representations of the Self in Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Leon Wieseltier – Cristina Nicolae

The book brings to the fore the concept of identity and its protean nature as framed in the literary discourse that would eventually stand for a metaphorical voyage within. Otherwise stated, the focus is on the way in which the elusive, chameleonic concept of selfhood is reflected in a selection of works by three authors belonging to different times, mentalities and ideologies, who are viewed not only as writers, but also as characters, whilst their oscillating convergent and/or divergent dynamics would emphasise once again the perpetually changing nature of the aforementioned concept. The three authors that served as ontological operators brilliantly set forth one of the constituent ideas of our troubled postmodernist consciousness: there are no pure artistic and reality-bound identities, but mixtures of real and fictional phantasms of the creative mind. Therefore, the book acknowledges and praises the inexhaustible capacity of the individual to invent and reinvent oneself, in perpetually surprising shapes/identities.

C. Nicolae