The power of the literary image: mediating memory and managing emotion in the literary memoirs of Virginia Woolf and Helen Garner

Despite wide scholarly consensus regarding our long-standing penchant for autobiographical literature, further critical work is needed to more clearly apprehend and articulate the interplay between particular narrative techniques and cognitive processes that combine to invite such enthusiastic readerly engagements with life writing texts. My Master of Research project - focusing specifically on the literary memoir - aims to identify and explicate a number of potent contributing factors that drive and motivate our ongoing readerly predilection for skillfully written autobiographical narratives. This transdisciplinary cognitive literary study examines selected passages from the literary memoirs of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) ('Moments of Being') and Helen Garner (1942- ('True Stories and Everywhere I Look'). It focuses specifically on textual representations of memory, emotion and empathy, three components crucial not only to both effective and affective portrayals of life narratives, but also to self understanding and the creation of personal narratives beyond writing, in lived experience.