Benjamin Franklin's portraits and colonial printing -- Phillis Wheatley and the durability of the author portrait -- Nationalist portraiture, magazines, and political books -- Picturing the seduction heroine in the U.S -- Gothic portraiture in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Ormond

"An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday —Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts."--Amazon.com.

An alienated young man searches for his life's purpose through a gallery of portraits at an exhibition. Afraid he may have contracted HIV the night before during a risky sexual encounter and only beginning to fathom the possible consequences, Robin winds his way through the rooms, studying the portraits of people from faraway places and times, looking for clues in the lives of others to the mystery of his own discontent. Several masterpieces of portrait painting, reproduced in the novel, become the focal-points of Robin's physical and spiritual journey; ranging from the Renaissance to the turn of the 21st century, they include works by such famous artists as Sandro Botticelli, Diego Velazquez, and John Singer Sargent. Each portrait opens like a time capsule to Robin's gaze, releasing stories about the sitters, artists, and critics who, over the centuries, have turned their everyday struggles, disappointments, and dreams into transcendent works of art. In the gallery, Robins bumps into a flesh-and-blood stranger--an HIV-positive psychotherapist and former monk--with whom he feels an uncanny rapport. Their meeting could change his life, but first he will have to confront a disturbing truth about himself. Steeped in art history and rich in psychological intrigue, Portraits at an Exhibition plunges the reader directly into the mind of Robin, seeing as he sees, reading what he reads, and learning, along with him, the often unsettling life lessons that only the closest observation of great art can teach.

A serious and independent contribution to the literature of autobiography. -- John SturrockFrench StudiesClearly a landmark study. It seems certain to provoke a great deal of productive debate among those concerned with any of the many issues it raises. -- Comparative Literature The literary self-portrait, often considered to be an ill- formed autobiography, is receiving more attention as a result of the current obsession with personal narrative, but little progress has been made toward an understanding of its specific features. With Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, Michel Beaujour reveals the hidden ambitions of this genre. From St. Augustine to Montaigne, from Nietzsche to Malraux, Leiris and Barthes, individual self-portraits are analyzed jointly with the enduring cultural matrix from which self-portrayal derives its disconcerting non-narrative structure, and many of its recurrent topics.