About Face: Depicting the Self in the Written and Visual Arts

How do we represent ouselves and the cultures we live in? Is it possible to trace any boundaries between reality and self-representation? Because the self represented is the product of a process of selection and choice, in many ways to represent the self is, often simultaneously, to create the self and negate the self. What, then, becomes of the self once it is represented?

Because the process of self-representation cumulates in a tangible result and given that any representation of the self is necessarily a construct which aims to render visible or knowable in concrete form the unseen and unknown, self-representation is vulnerable to assessments of its naturalness or artificiality, its honesty or deceit. Many issues affect the author or artist's self-representation, both as process and form: the medium through which the self will be represented, the motivation for representing oneself, and the role of the audience, to name only a few relevant factors.

This book explores the multifaceted nature of self-representation in relation to culture from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance up to contemporary Italian, American and Australian culture with reference to concepts and questions connected to literature, poetry, philosophy, theology, history, ethnicity studies, gender studies, and visual arts.