The Romance of Failure

This book focuses on the intense intimacy between author and first-person narrator in the fictions of Poe Hawthorne and James in order to defend the beleaguered I in these works against the depersonalizing tendencies of postructuralism. In reaffirming the importance of the human subject for the study of narrative Auerbach shows how the first person form in particular underscores fundamental problems of literary representation: how fictions come to be made and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.