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Recent publications belonging to British nature writing have been marked by an evolution in the representation of space and geography. Some authors have focused on reworking boundaries and direction, for instance in 2012 Poet Laureate Simon Armitage insisted in Walking Home that he should walk “in the wrong direction”, or Robert Macfarlane, who in 2012 partly structured The Old Ways according to the cardinal points which directed his walking explorations. Other authors choose to rework tropes belonging to the use of fixed points of reference in space by exploring directions as set markers, like Melissa Harrison with All Among the Barley (2018), which is set in East Anglia, or Sarah Hall in The Wolf Border (2015). As stressed by Abberley et al. in Land Lines it cannot be assumed that nature and nature writing work as markers for conservative ideals either, and it can be argued that such recent works have done much to reinvent nature writing as a genre which can exist with a strong sense of directional markers and cardinal points and a distinct aesthetics which points at connectedness. To examine the representation of such directions, we will pay particular attention to recent publications, and more specifically to two texts which were each awarded a recent literary prize (given the prolific quality of the field, readers have required an increase in orientation themselves): Uprooting (Marchelle Farrell 2023), which won the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2021, and English Pastoral (James Rebanks 2021), which won the Wainwright Prize the same year. We will then endeavour to observe the structuring role of cardinal points in these texts and their place in a quickly-evolving literary field.

Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky (2023) by Caro Giles and Cacophony of Bone (2023) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh are both memoirs written by “northern women” during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Caro Giles is based in Northumberland while Kerri ní Dochartaigh is from the North of Ireland and their memoirs both deal with motherhood, loss, and isolation while foregrounding uplifting connections between human animals and the natural environment which surrounds them. Their “northernness” is central to the orientations of Twelve Moons and Cacophony of Bone, which toy with the tensions between losing one’s bearings, bearing the brunt of loss, traumatic past events, isolation, and political uncertainty, and re-engaging with what Donna Haraway calls ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2016). This article aims to tease out these tensions alongside Haraway and to interrogate the ways in which both these non-fiction writers, who paradoxically emphasize their northern anchoring, foreground loss of bearings as simultaneously uncomfortable and as a prerequisite for healing. Loss of bearings, they show, is what facilitates a reconnection between themselves and the natural environment and is what makes the pain of traumatic events more bearable.

The thesis of this paper is connected to those poems that activate a semantic renewal of a different kind of “real” and explore the poetic imaginary of the coronavirus, focusing on how Rodica Braga translates the fear, chaos, shock and bewilderment caused by the pandemic into her poetry. In a close reading analysis we will investigate how the pandemic, with all its effects, has reconstructed reality through a “new normality”, identifying, also, the paradigm shifts that this concept has encountered. We will also focus on how the confinement led to a different kind of reflection of reality and life in writing. Also, in the subsequent interpretative exercise, we will analyze the presence of the author, at a figurative level, in the semantics of autofictional lyrical discourse and observe with the help of relevant examples from Rodica Braga's poems how a broad interpretation of this concept can be useful for understanding the acting roles and avatars adopted by the “I” in the author's works.

The global present has been diagnosed as a disruptive moment of disconnection. In this essay, I stage an interdisciplinary encounter between the self-reflexive genre of life writing on the one hand, and recent theories of personal development and leadership in order to compare recent approaches to the present as a moment of transformation. In order to overcome present disruptions, it is necessary to acknowledge past patterns of relating to the social and natural environment, but also to go beyond self- and systems awareness and develop innovative ways of connecting that complement a cognitive understanding of crisis with affective and embodied practices. By bringing together life writings and leadership theories, I introduce a range of current ways of envisioning connection and sketch how they may contribute to making more sustainable relational imaginaries and practices accessible to a wider public.

Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional Loitering with Intent (1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.

In The Witch Complex (2020), Isabelle Sorente tells how the image of the witch bursts into her life and into her writing, and leads her to question the psychic impact of witch hunts, as well as its tacit transmission to later generations. If contemporary literature "readily lays claim to inquiry as a writing process" (Laurent Demanze, Un nouvel âge de l'enquête), The Witch Complex illustrates this trend by combining historical inquiry, exploration of family memory, self-analysis and introspection. In our analysis of Isabelle Sorente's latest novel, we will turn our attention to this particular mode of literary representation of the inner life, where writing conceived as an investigation becomes the vehicle of an inner transformation. By pursuing a parallel analysis of the author's growing awareness of the witch hunts and of her own subjugation to the witch complex, and of the generic transformations that the text undergoes, we will see that the investigation first transforms the novel into an essay, and brings it closer to the notion of literature applied to psychoanalysis, as defined by P. Bayard. When the story unexpectedly turns to the author's adolescence and the traumatic experiences that marked her but have since been forgotten, we will see how the text further transforms when recalling the personal and family past, instead of being the culmination of storytelling, opens up the text to the stories of others, thus confirming the thesis of Judith Butler on the importance of the other for the act of storytelling. Ending on a series of reflections inspired by the various ways in which one can regain one's feminine truth, the text refuses any traditional narrative closure in its pursuit of an authentic search for spiritual truth, and its generic hybridity can be seen as serving the same purpose. Finally, the reflections of P. Ricoeur will allow us to articulate the relationship between documentary literature and the construction of the subject. Where the violence suffered takes away the power of the person over her own life, the textual configuration allows her to once again become the author of its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article takes its cues from autobiography scholar Marlene Kadar’s expansive, archivally focused feminist approach to life writing in its examination of two exemplars of visual culture: Ivan Sayers and Claus Jahnke’s From Rationing to Ravishing: The Transformation of Women’s Fashion in the 1940s & 1950s exhibition and Stan Douglas’s innovatively staged Helen Lawrence and its sister project, the interactive app and installation, Circa 1948. It illuminates both works biographically, exploring their creators’ relation to Vancouver to better understand the resurgence of noir in Vancouver circa 2014 as a form of translation intended to make historical lessons about crime and corruption visible for those willing to see them.

Although memoirs, confessions and diaries have gained huge popularity, life writing’s definition and values are not completely consolidated, as suggested by the unlimited discussion of autobiography and the different forms this genre can acquire. Moreover, since more and more non-professional authors have been publishing narratives about themselves, critics still tend to neglect these texts, which they often consider naïf and rough. This essay seeks to shed light on the dynamic mechanisms which exclude or include life writing in the literary realm. Aspects such as the influence of canonical autobiographies, the selective processes and the function of narrativity and will be scrutinized as well. The corpus will not only focus on texts by well-known authors (Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert), but also on works by ‘one hit wonders’ autobiographers (Fritz Zorn, Lucy Grealy).

Although memoirs, confessions and diaries have gained huge popularity, life writing’s definition and values are not completely consolidated, as suggested by the unlimited discussion of autobiography and the different forms this genre can acquire. Moreover, since more and more non-professional authors have been publishing narratives about themselves, critics still tend to neglect these texts, which they often consider naïf and rough. This essay seeks to shed light on the dynamic mechanisms which exclude or include life writing in the literary realm. Aspects such as the influence of canonical autobiographies, the selective processes and the function of narrativity and will be scrutinized as well. The corpus will not only focus on texts by well-known authors (Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert), but also on works by ‘one hit wonders’ autobiographers (Fritz Zorn, Lucy Grealy).

Censorship as a literary subject has sometimes been necessary in times of change, as it may show how the flaws in power relations influence, sometimes very dramatically, the access to and the production of knowledge. The Woman in the Photo: a Diary, 1987-1989 by Tia Șerbănescu and A Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca are two books that deal with the issue of censorship in the 1980s (the former) and the 1970s (the latter). Both writers tackle the problem from inside the ruling system, aiming at authenticity in different ways. On the one hand, instead of writing a novel, Tia Șerbănescu kept a diary in which she contemplated the oppression and the corruption of the time and their consequences on the freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. She thoroughly described what she felt and thought about her relatives, friends and other people she met, about books and their authors, in a time when keeping a diary was hard and often perilous. On the other hand, using the technique of the mise en abyme, Liliana Corobca begins from a fictitious exchange of emails to eventually enter and explore the mind of a censor and reveal what she thought and felt about the system, her co-workers, her boss, the books she proofread, their authors and her own identity. Detailed examinations and performances of the relationship between writing and censorship, the two novels provide engaging, often tragi-comical, insights into the psychological process of producing literary texts. The intention of this article is to compare and contrast the two author’s perspectives on the act of writing and some of its functions from four points of view: literary, cultural, social and political.

Copyright of Éducation et Francophonie is the property of Association Canadienne d'Education de Langue Francaise (ACELF) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1927, Sartre submitted a dissertation to the Ecole normale supérieure about the Image, that has been published recently. Already in this work he outlines one of the central theses of L'Imagination and L'Imaginaire, namely that a mental image is neither an internal image, nor the reproduction of previously known sensations, but is a pure act of creation. In his dissertation, Sartre sets down in writing the image in the life of the body and the mind, in a hesitant yet very inventive manner. It helps us to understand his subsequent books concerning image without detracting from their originality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lengas is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper focuses upon the history of Henry James’s life-writing. Three main reasons for Henry James’s high priority for biographers are proposed: (1) James’s ambivalent attitude to the craft and ethics of literary biography; (2) paradoxical combination of James’s extreme privacy with huge epistolary legacy; (3) intriguing scenario of his postmortem popularity, determined by a specific way of self- fictionalizing. The contribution of such scholars as Leon Edel, Frank Kaplan, Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon et al. is analyzed. Proliferation of biofictions about Henry James in 2000s (David Lodge, Colm Toibin, et al) is viewed as a result of James’s conscious automyth-making, which correlates with fictional elements in academic biographies of James. Fictionalizing of James’s life in academic biographies manifests itself in miming James’s idiolect, emphasizing the most dramatic events of his life, in accentuating ethically ambiguous episodes. Recent rethinking of James (self)image is based on blurring his sexual identification and on disavowing of the myth of a totally self-sufficient artist. The current situation in James’s life-writing may be characterized by travestying impulse (Richard Liebmann-Smith) and deconstruction of the academic myth-making mechanisms working in the very process of James’s biography-writing (Michael Anesco). The complicated and multidirectional (often reversive) process of myth-making and myth-destruction seems to be symptomatic of the current situation with Henry James life-writing. And that obviously sets it apart from an earlier state of matters (1990—2000s) when fictionalizing determined the main vector of the process.

In this two-part life writing script, I narrate and interpret my experiences as a teacher and parent of a “reluctant reader” in the early phases of learning to read. In the first part, I address the myths and panics that often overtake parents of young reluctant readers, who may fear that their children are at risk of falling behind their peers in reading. In the second part, using the Four Directions teachings taught by Elder Bob Cardinal of the Enoch Nation in a graduate holistic curriculum studies course at the University of Alberta, I interpret the process of learning to read as a relational and careful act of ceremony, which literally overflows the dominant interpretation of reading as a technical, fragmented skill of decoding. The lovely, difficult work of learning to read, when treated as a gift between generations, opens up possibilities for “renewing a common world” (Arendt, 2006, p. 196).

IP Memoirs - memoirs by women who have become mothers via a gestational surrogate's contractual labor which turns them into IPs (Intended Parents) - are a recent literary phenomenon situated in a particular forcefield of morally charged, legally contested and socially tested debates and discourses. The contribution looks at select examples of "IP memoirs" and analyzes the narrative and argumentative strategies employed to explain, illustrate and justify the road taken towards motherhood.

Returning to Reims by the French sociologist Didier Eribon is an innovative attempt at social self-analysis, that is, autobiography combined with theory, taking into account the social factors that influence a life. Setting out to explore his detachment from his family, Eribon analyses the rightward drift of the working-class. Published 2009 in France, especially its German translation became a bestseller. This article reviews Eribon's project in the context of biography theory. Taking into account that Eribon started out as biographer of Michel Foucault, it deals with the connection of auto/biography and theory and outlines the theories (by Bourdieu and Foucault) and methods behind Eribon's returns and reflections.

This article on Hennie Aucamp approaches his journals as ego-documents. The positional dilemma and identity crisis of Afrikaners in the new South Africa are portrayed in the triptych: Gekaapte tyd (Captured time, 1996), Allersiele (All Souls, 1997) and Skuinslig (Light at Dusk, 2003). Aucamp’s journals constitute a hybrid composite that bridges the space between a personal reflection on daily life and that of a historical, social and cultural document. Through the complex process of disguise and revelation of the “I”, Aucamp’s diaries create a space that allows free contemplation and reflection both on the socio-cultural developments in the new South Africa and on the fate of Afrikaners and Afrikaans itself. It is from his feeling of displacement and expatriation as a white Afrikaner under the new system and his fear of the disappearance of Afrikaners and Afrikaans that Aucamp positions himself as a defender of Afrikaner culture. Moreover, Aucamp claims that this cultural legacy could be used as future-oriented survival strategy the preservation of culture being simultaneously self-preservation. It is within this framework that he makes a subtle comparison between Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture and the culture of the San; his affinity for the lost culture of the San runs parallel with his defence of the world of Afrikaners. This has resulted in the writer’s socio-cultural criticisms and commentaries in a certain sense becoming a personal performance in favour of the recreation of a lost Afrikaner language and culture. At the same time, they illustrate the writer’s attempt to position himself strategically with regard to the future-oriented formation of identity—not only of himself, but also of the reader. It is within this context that the increase in ego-documents written in modern-day South African and Afrikaner literature can also be seen as a struggle against loss and forgetting.

Olga Kirsch was an English-speaking Jewess who wrote and published poetry in Afrikaans. As such she exemplifies a crossover poet who introduces the voice of the other into a national canon in her case, the only Jewish voice in Afrikaans poetry. Three questions were raised in the research and writing of her biography. The first concerns the extent to which she, as a Jew, was influenced by the dominant culture in which she grew up. The second seems more complex: What influence has Olga Kirsch had on the dominant culture was she able to influence the South African Afrikaans culture and literature in any way? Third, to what extent does the multi-culturalism of Kirsch affect the process of research and writing her biography; are there problems specific to writing the biography of a cross-cultural writer?

What seems to be a typical feature of Boer women’s personal texts which refer to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) is the militant rhetoric of protest against the British aggression. Met die Boere in die Veld (“With the Boers in the Veld”) by Sarah Raal is a perfect example of this trend. Yet, her case is unique, because she actually spent a part of the war in the veld, fighting side by side with her brothers, which definitely was not a traditional place for a woman during a military conflict. Her memoirs were published for the first time in the 1930s, reprinted a number of times, and re-issued in 2000 in two language editions— Afrikaans and English (significantly under a new title, The Lady who Fought). An additional introduction was added to both new editions, which suggests a new role of the heroine and a new meaning of her story. This paper discusses how Raal’s original foreword and the new introduction influence the reader’s response to the text. Additionally, attention is drawn to the role of other paratextual elements of the book and the matter of translation. Having taken into account political and gender discourses operating as a context for every reading, the text undergoes re-interpretations. Consequently, the book, once an anti-British Afrikaner nationalist propaganda story, turns into a popular adventure tale about a brave Boer girl, a story about an exceptional woman, a proto-feminist who transgresses the conventional gender roles, or into a universal pacifist protest. In the 2000 edition pacifist and feminist aspects come to the foreground, and this way the old story becomes a suitable read for the modern post-apartheid reader.

This article is concerned with the different genre applications to Indigenous Australian autobiographies. Scholarship has not employed a consistent genre designation for this literature. This article identifies the reasons for a particular genre choice in scholarship and draws on interviews with scholars and authors to test their motivation for either adopting or rejecting the term 'autobiography' for Indigenous life narratives.