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[Extract] The predicament at the heart of Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s recent book is that although girls have long testified to the violence they suffer, they are often disbelieved by the adults who have the power to investigate their claims. Children and young people are not seen as credible witnesses because the perceived association of childhood with naivety prevents adults from seeing children as equipped to understand the world and speak reliably about their experience of it. Doubly disempowered, girls also face gendered discrimination that leads to silencing.

Mita Banerjee’s Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography claims to focus on “what happens to the humanities” as they “export some of ...

In this essay, the authors compares two works of life writing by two French-language writers of Caribbean origin: Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor. Both writers represent contemporary border crossings in their work and, importantly, contextualize these border crossings in terms of the history of the Caribbean and the legacy of slavery. Their texts are read through the lens of Michael Sheringham’s notion of the “autobiographical turning point”—an event in life writing that defines the life and the life writer, that changes the direction of the narrative, and that performs the acts of remembering and forgetting. The authors argue that these writers’ texts present border crossings as turning points in their narratives that are flawed or failures, and that these major events became spiraling rather than turning points. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In The Americanization of Human Rights: Iranian, African and Chinese Lives in American Autobiography (Universitatsverlag, 2019), Suncica Klaas brings together a fascinating body of life writing ari...

The publication of a selection of Paul John Eakin’s essays on life writing in the new Routledge Auto|Biography Studies series represents a landmark in the history of this immensely fertile genre. T...

If British academic memoirs disclosed the personal origins of professional careers, they also became themselves intellectual performances subject to critical disciplinary judgment. Ambiguity, irony...

Biography (hereinafter construed to also include autobiography) is an attempt to reconstruct a life through various biographic means, ranging from, amongst others, access to (archival) records, doc...

Lists can be found everywhere online: from the interfaces of search engines and social media to so-called listicles, lists are an inherent part of most of the Internet. Social media applications in...

Guided by autobiographical, travel, and life writing theories in general, this article examines Sihle Khumalo’s travelogs to argue that contemporary ways of knowledge production about Africa are ov...

Prominent South African writer of the black diaspora Es’kia Mphahlele attributes his humanist consciousness to his grandmother and mother. His various forms of life writing (blurring the boundaries...

This essay examines two recent memoirs of schizophrenia in Singapore: Chan Lishan’s A Philosopher’s Madness and Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch. The narratives, through the memoir form, question vo...

This article argues that blues memoirs are an example of life writing in the Anthropocene. Building on ecocritical scholarship which suggests that blues is a neglected source of environmental cultu...

This article contemplates ecobiography, a little-researched form of life writing which depicts how human selves are supported and shaped by their environment. It details the author’s ecobiography of botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805–1843) and the plants she collected from the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, alongside an analysis of an Australian ecobiography, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This special issue is a companion to the preceding issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Engaging Donna Haraway: lives in the natureculture web.” We sustain its questioning of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies now, and the turn to “phytographia” in this issue complements the focus on animal lives there. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

A conservative analysis of extinctions of other-than-human species published in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America estimates that “as much a...

Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a widely traveled figure with an important relation to life writing. This article traces the cyborg through modes of life writing and routes through feminist science fiction and science studies. It examines attachments and anger, looking at the return of the alienated cyborg in recent accounts of Haraway’s work. One of Donna Haraway’s most charismatic and widely travelled figures is that of the cyborg. It emerges as a figure in her writing in the 1980s and 1990s, and enables important interventions in thinking about lives as always already technological and prosthetic. One of its gifts is that it offers a different way into this than either technological evolutionism or the posthumanism of actor-network theory. The cyborg is a figure of specificity, of fiction but also of real-life couplings of technology and flesh, which are neither evolutionarily determined nor neutral but, in Haraway’s terms, are non-innocent encounters. The non-innocent relationality of the cyborg is posited as one of responsibility, which, in Haraway’s lexicon, evokes both an ability to respond to others and an ethics of encounter. The cyborg is a singular figure, although, in Haraway’s work, singularity is always multiple and allows for thinking about the life of life story and technology.1 The figure has generated strong attachments, multiple stories, and anger over the last thirty years. This article traces a partial examination of the manifesto as life writing, and surveys debates about and practices of cyborg life writing, including autobiography and fiction. It examines the possibilities of the cyborg, including anger, rejection, and reconfiguration (as embryo and doppelg€anger), as well as its relation to life itself more broadly conceived.

In this essay, I want to draw attention to the meaningful dynamics between life writing and list-making and the form of the list in the context of literary autobiography. The intriguing nature of t...

While autobiography has a long tradition in the Arab world, with roots in medieval texts, it appears to have entered the literary sphere most prominently during the Nahda, a period beginning in the...

Reflecting the authorial self as well as their own production, autobiographic texts are often perceived as “narcissistic.” By drawing on narratological and psychoanalytic theories about nar...

Recently, trans has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. It is a prefix that conveys the send of “across, through, over, to or on the oth...

The forum “Life Writing and the Poetics of List-Making” aims to contribute to current scholarly discussions about the form of the list in literary discourses as it sets out to explore life narrativ...

This article offers a metatheoretical exploration of how we think through, understand, and categorize trans life writing. It explores Judith Butler’s theory of cultural intelligibility, the use of ...

In 1989, as part of her landmark collection Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, Marlene Kadar wrote an introduction called “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—from Genre to Critical...

My ongoing research, driven by archival praxis, has been grounded in life writing, women’s studies, modernism, and popular culture. After becoming a mother in the late 1990s, I was increasingly inv...

Intersections of gender, migration, and literature—specifically life writing—are a site of inquiry in my research and teaching. I am a German immigrant who came to the US on a student visa and chan...

The Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot was a famous doctor not only because of his widely read book Avis au peuple sur sa sante, published in 1761, but also because he was the recipient of numer...

Readers of a|b: Auto|Biography Studies will be most directly interested in “Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing,” the third section of Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty's substantial co...

Critical posthumanism, as distinguished from popular posthumanism (see Simon), troubles virtually every tenet of autobiographical practice and criticism—the autonomous self, the pact between author...

Historically, auto|biography studies has had sporadic contact with media studies. This is because the question of the aesthetic, psychological, social, and political formations of life narrative ha...

Trigger warning: This essay contains information about sexual assault and|or violence that may be triggering to survivors.Teaching fails tend to be more serious in classes about producing rather th...

If Black women are compelled to conceal their life stories, as Darlene Clark Hine suggests, how can biographers of Black women's lives, who work closely with student researchers, do justice to thei...

If you have been teaching life writing in a literary-studies program for as long as I have (eighteen years), you might have had your share of failures, or at least of “teachable moments” when you s...

This essay examines the memoir as a viable educational tool. By means of a case study of an undergraduate interdisciplinary seminar, the author argues that a self-conscious assessment of disciplinary assumptions and an awareness of the affective aspects of the practice of life writing are important factors to consider for memoir pedagogies.

This essay examines the genre of autobiogenography, where autobiography is now written from the molecular level upward. Autobiogenography documents a process of self-discovery mediated through know...

My paper focuses on rural diaries kept by British settlers in Alberta in the early twentieth century. I reveal how the authors’ extraordinary attention to their bodies and to the bodies of others during labor, leisure, or illness shows clearly the centrality of bodily possession in the project of homesteading in Alberta.

As-told-to life writing involves one person telling their life story to another, who, with varying degrees of creative intervention, writes it up on their behalf. Traditionally it has been read by ...

Augustine spends a great deal of time in his Confessions discussing memory, recounting his life from childhood to the present moment of writing. As Sheri Katz notes, “memory in Augustine's broad us...

When writing about place and the self, the practice of eco-autobiography is not new. Contributors to Ecology and Life Writing examine interrelations between nature writing and literature in a cross...

Life writing and life-writing studies today seem to be closely connected to people and institutions in Anglophone countries, more specifically in the classical countries of immigration: America, Ca...

“What is next?” is apt in life writing, especially when we look to the lyric and wonder “what's next there?” and discover something exciting ahead for both: the “biographical lyric,” or what I call...

When it comes to prognostication, I agree with Yogi Berra: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” I prefer to think of what follows as “informed speculation” about the futur...

Recent auto|biography studies scholarship focuses on how technologically mediated relationships help people experiencing illness, bereavement, trauma, marginalization, or adversities (e.g. Banner; ...

Since Steven Yao predicted the “The Rising Tide of the Transpacific,” transpacific studies has indeed started to catch up with its transatlantic counterpart. Within the field of auto|biography stud...

Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biographical fiction, this article examines fictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Carola Oman's Miss Barrett's Elopement to Laura F...