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This book review explores the publication of an email correspondence between Carl Leggo and Kimberley Holmes which occurred over the period of time that Leggo was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment for a brain tumour that eventually ended his life. It observes his role as a super-mentor of graduate students undertaking works in poetic inquiry and life writing, and his commitment to living poetically until his unfortunate passing in 2019. The review considers some ethical issues associated with this publication and the reasons why it provides useful insights to anyone committed to academic mentorship.

This thesis considers how first-person written accounts might provide an understanding of the lived experience of illness in France by exploring how temporality is evoked and expressed in texts drawn from a French archive of life writing, L’Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (L’APA). The questions addressed are: How is temporality expressed in first-person illness narratives? What is the influence of turning points? How are the effects of illness on everyday experiences and the impact of healthcare culture manifest in the texts? How do the writers reflect changes in their temporality? Dialogical Narrative Analysis (DNA) is used to analyse a select sample of texts that are contextualised and elucidated by reference to secondary source materials, which are drawn from the fields of French studies, life writing, narrative medicine and medical humanities. My research approach, which places the patient’s story at the centre of the analysis, is informed by the principle of ‘narrative humility’ from narrative medicine and the ethos of the Archive to « lire en sympathie ». These illness narratives share common themes in the writers expression of temporality, including turning points and the impact of illness on their daily lives. The diversity of genres and the idiosyncratic approaches some writers take in expressing their temporality and their desire to ‘laisser une trace’ reflect the culture of life writing in France. Illness narratives provide significant insights into patients’ experiences, which could be harnessed in educational programmes to improve patient care. These texts also provide cultural information, which could be used to ameliorate the social context of those who are living with illness. This research project demonstrates how L’APA’s archive of life writing is a rich resource for further enquiry within the interdisciplinary field of French studies and medical humanities. 2025-02-15

This chapter introduces the volume by outlining some crucial scholarly histories: the feminist study of motherhood and mothering, and the literary study of mothers in fiction and life writing, across many differences. Since mothers, motherhood, and mothering not only are defined by physical and material experiences but also take shape in narratives—in stories and recorded accounts—these also need to be continuously studied and theorized if we are to understand the culturally specific meanings of motherhood. The chapter then introduces each of the separate studies in the volume. These variously demonstrate that literary representations of mothers and mothering foreground the ways that parenthood and parenting for women are imbricated with dimensions like class, race, age, and nationality, as well as how motherhood is connected to living a heterosexual, lesbian, queer, or trans everyday life. In original analyses of a range of representations, from absent/missing mothers to highly present ones, the studies that comprise this book engage in a dialogue with the previous research, raising questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence and by profound ambivalences, about how maternal perspectives and voices gain space or mix with filial voices in the narratives, and about how mothers are constructed in relation to ideals and norms of motherhood.

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

[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

During WWII, a number of British, American and Dutch Far East prisoners of war (FEPOWs) held captive by the Japanese in the Kamioka POW camp in Japan are known to have kept secret war diaries. This...

This article utilises a unique collection of life-writing manuscripts to reconsider generational difference, father/daughter relationships, and autobiography in nineteenth-century England. Although...

This paper analyzes the concept of nostos through a reading of Italian-Canadian writer Genni Gunn’s autobiographical travelogue Tracks: Journeys in Time and Place (2013) to show how its narratives of movement contest meanings of home and homecoming. Gunn initiates new ways of thinking about return by taking the migrant traveler as its central figure and envisioning home as a “practice of displacement” (Evelein 21) wherein “home” is not achievable through physical return, but through memory. Specifically, Gunn subverts traditional notions of home by reimagining Italy through her travels to foreign places, which ultimately serve as sites of return to her homeland via cartographies of memory. In Gunn’s exploration of nostalgia, her narrative presents her identity as an Italian-Canadian immigrant as no longer defined by national borders, but rather as a condition of movement. Gunn uses the framework of travel to link acts of homemaking and homefinding so that the meaning of nostos emerges as a kind of dwelling-in-displacement.

The number of migration museums is growing all over the world. These new museums seek to actively shape debates about immigration, and they often rely on immigrants’ personal stories to engage museum visitors and immigrant communities in dialogue. The article uses the case study of France’s National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris and its collection of personal stories (The Gallery of Gifts) to explore this new form of story-activism and our concepts of hospitality. Drawing on Hélène du Mazaubrun’s, Jacques Derrida’s, Joan Stavo-Debauge’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about gifting, hospitality, and recognition, I examine some challenging politico-ethical questions prompted by these immigrant story exhibitions.

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...

Prison is a marginal space that is hidden from society, and life writing by prisoners thus offers valuable insights into prison life. This paper examines prisoner writing, as a genre neglected by a...

This review article examines the 2018 publication by Helena History Press of A Nation Adrift [‘Az elsodort ország’]: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyő. Translated by Miksa Fenyő’s son, Mario D. Fenyő, this work gains new layers of meaning when alternately read as a Holocaust narrative, a family history, an example of life writing and the continuation of intellectual activity in the face of great adversity. Only recently available to an English-speaking audience, Az elsodort ország provides a remarkably comprehensive, well-composed description of the Hungarian Holocaust, World War II and the Siege of Budapest, as related by Miksa Fenyő (1877-1972), the former editor and critic of the modern literary journal, Nyugat [‘West’] and deputy director of GyOSz [Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetsége; ‘Association of Hungarian Industrialists’].

The following conversation with leading scholars in the fields of Black Atlantic literatures and cultures, life writing, and literary studies offers a number of considerations on the state of Black...

Since the memoir boom in the 1990s, non-fiction forms have continued to increase in popularity and market share, and hybrid forms such as autofiction and semi-autobiographical novels have established a pronounced place in literary culture. Yet many creative writing programmes remain focussed on fiction, reflecting students’ overwhelming interest in pursuing the novel as a form, and reluctance to see their own lived experiences as material for creative work. However, rather than seeing the novel and memoir as competing or dichotomous forms, we suggest that the trend in literary culture is to witness a collapsing of these distinctions in favour of hybrid works which sit on a spectrum of perceived truth claims. This article outlines a pedagogical response to a gap that exists between students’ understandings of the novel and memoir genres, and the increasing complication and hybridity emerging between those forms. We outline the pedagogical theory informing our approach, which emphasises complex and hybrid thinking, experimentation and reflective authorship practice. We argue that teaching novel and memoir in tandem encourages students to view life writing and fiction as existing on a spectrum of formal possibilities rather than fixed generic types, and cultivates students’ awareness of these developments in the field.

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

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...

Over the last 25 years, memoirs and testimonies have appeared in Mozambique recounting the life stories of participants in the armed struggle for national independence led by FRELIMO (1964–1974). M...

This paper explores the epistemological potential opened up by focusing on material culture within life writing. Dynamics of social class, cultural legitimacy, and aspirational labour are foregroun...

Life Writing’s choice to feature twenty-first century autoethnography offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of constructed self and culture in w...

The notion of the identity project fosters a persistent emphasis on consumer goals and plans and has dominated many interpretations of consumers undergoing transformation. This article contrasts this self-will view by introducing the lived experience of poetizing. Poetizing represents our moments of humble vulnerability when we wonder about life circumstances that we do not control or understand as we experience transformation. In those moments of humble vulnerability, we are possessed by our identities, rather than owning an identity project. By adopting the theoretical lens of poetizing, we enrich our capacity to represent the messiness of life and make space for a critical understanding of the accidentality of identity in creation and its embedded vulnerability.

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...

Letters have sometimes been assumed to be a private form of life writing, and certainly many of the South African writer Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) letters have been read in this way. However, her letters trouble any simple, binary notions of public and private. This article offers a re-reading of Schreiner’s letters to the statistician and founder of the Men and Women’s Club, Karl Pearson (1857–1936). It argues that the dominant reading that has been made of these letters as ‘unrequited love letters’ needs rethinking, for when these letters are considered in their entirety and contextualised as part of Schreiner’s wider extant letters, and when the intertwining of their public and private aspects is recognised, it becomes clear that a considerably more complex interpretation of her letters is required, and that this has implications for reading letters more generally.

Residential migration is one of the most problematic demographic variables. In Britain there are no sources that routinely record all moves, and the motives behind relocation are rarely recorded. In this paper I argue that the use of life histories can add important depth and clarity to the study of residential moves. The paper focuses on two themes: the ways in which internal and international migration may be linked together over the life course, and the complex mix of reasons why a move may take place. Used sensitively, life histories and life writing can enhance the study of migration history.

From its revival in 1981, the Mass Observation Project has collected life writing. In response to open ended questionnaires (‘directives’), MO correspondents send in what often amount to fragments of autobiography. While this material has been explored by researchers ‘horizontally’, to discuss attitudes and behaviour in relation to the themes raised by particular directives, my book Seven Lives from Mass Observation is the first attempt to use the material ‘vertically’, assembling the fragments of autobiography contributed by some individual writers who continued to respond over two or three decades. In an earlier book, Nine Wartime Lives, I used MO's original wartime diaries (and directive responses) to write biographical essays exploring a set of common themes, derived from the mature historiography of the period, from the contrasting perspectives of nine very different observers who had all participated as active citizens in public life. This article describes the very different challenges and insights posed by the use of the more recent MOP material. The longer time frame, and less developed historiography, demanded toleration of initial confusion in the research process before the key theme of a contrast between the 1960s and 1980s emerged. The reflective narrative of MOP's autobiographical fragments (different from the immediacy of the MO wartime diaries) shaped the sample chosen: a single older generational cohort, born between the two world wars, responding to the 1960s and the 1980s as adults formed by earlier experiences. Writing intimate biographies of living people, guaranteed anonymity when they first volunteered for MOP, required developing a set of ethical protocols in conjunction with the MO Trustees.

Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.

In 1601 Bess of Hardwick, the wealthiest woman in Elizabethan England (second only to the Queen herself), began her final will and testament. The precision with which Bess bequeathed her monetary a...

Life writing is frequently considered as a private act of composition and reflection. What are the benefits and challenges if students are asked to participate in a collaborative life-writing proje...

In April 2019, Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, undertook a trip to the Antarctic peninsula. In this arti...

This article builds on the most recent work done on ekphrasis in contemporary fiction and explores its capacities to blur the boundary between visual art and life writing. Since ekphrasis can contest the border of the work of art, this article also draws from Derrida's notion of the parergon (1987). Ekphrasis is most commonly understood as the ���verbal representation of a visual representation��� (Heffernan 1993), while the parergon captures the ambiguous, ���ornamental��� frame that separates the artwork from the world beyond it. By focusing on Amy Sackville's Painter to the King (2018) and Laura Cumming's The Vanishing Man (2016), two books that use Diego Vel��zquez's painting Las Meninas (1656) to frame their life narratives, this article shows how ekphrasis can act as a discursive parergon that challenges the borders between art and life, fact and fiction, literature and painting, and inside and outside. These empathetic life narratives���of a Spanish painter and a Victorian bookseller respectively���emulate Vel��zquez's visual techniques and implicate the reader, who is turned into a quasi-eyewitness through ekphrasis, within their meaning-making structures. In both instances, the enchanting spell of Vel��zquez's painting is used to push these life narratives into the realm of the imagination.

"“A Star Is Born”: Gender, Soft Power and Biopics in Cold-War Romanian Cinema (Darclée, 1961) Obsessively interested in life writing from the periods of 20th-century dictatorships, Romanian post-communist culture has been dominated, with very few exceptions, by male authors. However, shyly, yet steadily, in this large-scale attempt to retrace and understand the traumatic past, there has been an opening in recent years towards women authors. Although few by comparison, these personal narratives are memorable. In terms of biographical novels and biopics, the most striking feature is the absence of such female representations. Departing from this context of gender oblivion and inequality, and considering the specificities of the life writing genre and its filmic representations, the current paper focuses on Darclée (Mihai Iacob, 1961), one of the very few biopics in Romanian cinema that revolves around a famous woman. Aside from being a rare, female-centered exception among Romanian biopics, the film is also noteworthy for its politicized content and therefore interesting to discuss in relation to the political context, the totalitarian regime present at the time in Romania and its cultural discourse. Despite dealing with a-turn-of-the-century figure of aristocratic and bourgeois origins, the film (with the wife of a communist leader in the leading role) is politically appropriated by the communist regime and announces National Communism in Romanian culture. The analysis will thus consider the political discourse employed in Darclée, with its unexpected nationalist emphasis, as well as the film’s strategies of representation as it covers, in a rare occasion, a female figure. Keywords: life writing, gender, Romanian cinema, Cold War biopic, musical film "

If Marie Mancini, niece of Louis XIV's chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, has come down through the ages, it has been because of her youthful love affair with the king and the scandal she caused late...

An audacious thread runs through Jennifer Cooke’s text; every element of close reading and critical interpretation is considered through a prism of audacity. The author begins the text with a discu...

We reflect on experiences we have had working, living and walking alongside our students. We interpret these experiences to reveal the silences at play as we walk stories into being together and attune ourselves to the places we both create and inhabit. We ground our exploration of the connection between walking and curriculum in life writing and literary métissage (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). Throughout, we draw inspiration from Abram (1996) to explore the notion of walking as quiet participation, which we characterize as a bodily attunement toward each other and the more-than-human world, and we point to its possibilities for how we work and live alongside one another.

Life writing is ubiquitous in John Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. Kinsella’s employment of the diversity of modes collected under the rubric of “life writing” is underpinned by a “poetics of dirt.” Such a...

This article asks how the distinctive use of life-writing and focus on inter-ethnic intimacy in Han Suyin’s popular middlebrow romance fictions A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and The Mountain is Y...

This is part two of the essay exploring the activities of strikers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL over a 14 day-period in the early spring of 2018. These days were part of the 2018 Uni...

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine’s letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach.

For scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. ...

Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020) was a much-loved and inspirational scholar, friend and mentor. He contributed significantly to the intellectual, organisational, and cultural life of postcolonial legal studies, critical legal studies and law and the humanities – fields he helped to consolidate. This paper examines the reciprocal interplay between Peter’s life and work, between significant people, events, ideas and values, and the ways he made and re-made himself. It assesses and clarifies his key ideas and their intersection with his ethics and lived experiences. It illuminates his struggle, especially from the 1990’s onwards, to place ethics centre-stage in both life and law. Drawing on archival and secondary research, including interviews with his family, former colleagues and students, this contribution to legal life writing adds to what we already knew about his personal and professional biography. It is hoped that the paper will encourage those who are less familiar with Peter’s work, or who find his writing daunting, to tackle it anew and appreciate its significance.

This article examines life writing as a research method to uncover new insights about the interrelationships between beings and place including with fashion and clothing. In it, the practice of usi...

In her 1927 essay ‘The New Biography’, Virginia Woolf famously distinguishes between the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth and the ‘rainbow-like intangibility’ of personality. For Woolf, the biograp...