Abstract
This article considers the life and death of Diana from a theoretical perspective. It makes use of post-structuralist and psychoanalytical theory in order to examine representations of Diana as a fetish point for cultural investment, a collective phantasy around which absence and melancholia oscillates for the post-modern subject. Andrew Morton's book Diana: Her True Story is referred to in order to concentrate upon her identity as a locus of textuality. The paper considers the act of telling as central to such identity so that the destination of the story of self is fully implicated in recognition by the reading other. It moves on to comment upon Diana as intertext which results in a complex textual web where any idea of 'true story' must be radically lost. The idea of biography as an 'authorized version' of an other will be questioned. The paper then argues that the story of the life and death of Diana represents an ironic metanarrative for a post-modern arena.