Search

[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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

This essay explores 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 University and College ...

The following analysis looks at current discussions surrounding testimony in the form of life writing. In particular it looks at how competing theories of mediation fare when applied to concrete ex...

In this highly sophisticated and theoretically well-informed study, Patricia Lopez-Gay examines how the contemporary impulse to archive has a bearing on biographical narratives, especially those wh...

This article explores the relationship between life-writing, domestic space and cultural memory , discussing Bernadette Devlin’s 1969 memoir The Price of My Soul, and Nell McCafferty’s 1988 book Pe...

In this article, Sally R Munt reflects on issues of social class discrimination in higher education in an engaging conversation with Louise Morley, both from the University of Sussex.

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...

This essay engages with life writing in Janet Frame’s 1957 novel, Owls Do Cry and Jane Campion’s 1990 film biopic of Frame’s autobiographies, An Angel At My Table. It aims to consider the physical ...

“‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.” - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (5) “I am going to stick to ghosts and bridge games and haunted houses, where I belong.” - ...

This introductory article maps out the relationship between life writing and interiors. It examines the connections between interior spaces, interior matter and interior selves and foregrounds how ...

This article examines how the autobiographies of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant represent the work of writing in relation to the domestic labour and familial duties that are gendered as “w...

Human-animal relationships in farming are complex, with husbandry and sincere attachment to animals enmeshed with the economics, politics, and socio-cultural conditions that shape farming. In these...

The notion of roots, of place and belonging, is always charged with significant emotional investment in diasporic imaginary. The mythogenies of birth, origin, nation, faith and all the other tropol...

Although he was most commonly regarded as a poet of the rural world, Robert Bloomfield's success as a writer is inextricably linked to the urban and artisanal culture that shaped both his sense of ...

Climate change and the concerns it raises for the environment and all those inhabiting planet earth, human and nonhuman alike, have prompted waves of activism since the last decades of the twentiet...

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...

Despite increasing engagement with queer theory and its literature in African scholarship, representations of transgenderism have received very little attention, relegating transgender identity to ...

The author encourages family members to write about their memories of shared events from the past in an attempt to foster a sense of connection after bereavement. When one impactful shared experien...

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...

Recent developments in literary and life writing scholarship have interrogated the division and hierarchy between subject and object or human and non-human. This material turn interests me as it su...

In this article, we discuss Ben Quilty’s Home: Drawings by Syrian Children (2018) as a case study that explores how we might approach children’s life narratives that are mediated by adult curators....

This autoethnographic essay examines how life writing can engage with environmental accountability and human and animal relationships through the material and symbolic presence of the figurine. It ...

American novelist Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians. In 2003, she published Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, a travel narrative in which she e...