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This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women in recent centuries. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.

"The analogous relationship between DNA replication and women’s resistance writing in Latin America highlights the ways in which impossible forms of autobiography adapt and move on, undetected, through the inhospitable environments of dictatorship. Through adaptive forms of poetry, memoir, and the autobiographical novel by women in Chile, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, narratives of dissent lend defiance against three of the most murderous and misogynist autocracies of the twentieth century. As Richard Dawkins points out in his study of human evolution, The Selfish Gene, because genes bear partial responsibility for their own survival, they depend not only on the efficiency of the hosts in which they live, but also on their ability to function as selfish survival machines that will adapt when threatened (23-24). Like genes, these narratives must adapt to their environments and prove capable of reemerging over time in cycles of resistance, liberation, and survival when facing the perils of dictatorship."

Margaret Oliphant and Andrew Lang were impressively prolific authors who responded to each other's periodical criticism and influenced each other's theories of life writing. Their reception history, however, has diverged sharply. While both writers fell out of fashion for much of the twentieth century, Oliphant's autobiography sparked new interest in her work among feminists and life-writing scholars, while Lang's lack of a definitive autobiography, along with the over-quotation of a few hostile letters by others, made him into a caricature. I examine Oliphant and Lang's good-humored sparring in "The Old Saloon" in Blackwood's and "At the Sign of the Ship" in Longman's , as well as their correspondence regarding Lang's Life of Lockhart (1896), as a way of drawing attention to their differing levels of authority as authors of criticism and life writing.

"Throughout literary history, war has been a recurrent theme in life writing. This article discusses life writing as an important aspect of comparative literature or world literature, and focuses on three early modern women’s geographical experiences and liminal identities as found in their life writings: Marguerite of Valois (1553-1615), a Catholic and Queen consort of Navarre who served as a supporter of Protestants during the French wars of religion, Queen Henrietta Maria of England (1609-69), and Lady Brilliana Harley (1598-1643), the wife of a Parliamentarian representative of England. These three noblewomen used their writings as means of constructing their identities in the public sphere."

The controversial Irish Protestant healer Valentine Greatrakes's 1666 autobiography is an under-appreciated text in the history of anglophone life writing, one that invites us to rethink the early history of a genre that has long been linked to a spatialized, specular, and mimetic model of the self. In contrast to the post-Lockean texts that posit that model, A Brief Account of Mr Valentine Greatrak's and Divers of the Strange Cures by Him Lately Performed incorporates Greatrakes's unorthodox method of healing by touch over time into the process of literary self-representation. As it plays between poles of distance and proximity, objectivity and contingency, shadow and substance the resulting textual "perform[ance]" may be historicized in terms of late-seventeenth-century conceptions of what Greatrakes's implied reader, the pneumatic chemist Robert Boyle, called the "little atmospheres" that surround human bodies—"atmospheres" that anticipate Walter Benjamin's modern notion of the aura but treat aura as a uniquely communicative aspect of the person. Greatrakes's shamanistic practice binds his readers to his patients, thereby developing a therapeutic form of transpersonal, transhistorical, transgeneric personal identity uniquely realized in the literary text.

VISUALIZING JEWISH NARRATIVE: JEWISH COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS Edited by Derek Parker Royal. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. xiv + 294 pp.Whether one is a scholar or a teacher whose classroom has been happily infiltrated by graphic novels, memoirs, comics, or other sequential narratives, this volume of twenty-one essays offers much to cherish and ponder (alas, due to its steep price most readers will require access to a research library). Its highlights include an exemplary introduction by editor Derek Parker Royal that succinctly presents some of the often charged debates about both the prominent role of Jews in the early comics industry and the "Jewish" nature of their contributions.At the outset, it should be noted that even among the volume's less accomplished essays (a few more descriptive than genuinely analytical) there is something valuable to glean. While structured in four wide-ranging thematic sections ("Picturing Jewish Identity"; "Jewish Engagements with Comic Genres"; "Jewish Comics, the Holocaust, and Trauma"; Representation of Israel, Biblical Text, and Legend"), more often than not the contingent nature of life in the Diaspora-its joys as well as grave uncertainties-form a unifying theme. A gripping exemplar occurs in a memorable discussion of acclaimed French artist Johann Sfar's Klezmer, where James and Nicole Goldberg argue that Sfar "redirects our cultural memory of shtetl life from 'Tradition' to the unpredictability and improvisation of klezmer music." Their observation that Sfar's outsider musician characters "perform in a space between unity and cacophony, unsure of whom or what to trust and yet confident enough to embrace the fragmentary nature of living in the diaspora" applies to many of the figures addressed in Visualizing Jewish Narrative.No collection of this scope can overlook the seminal influence of Will Eisner, and both Lan Dong's and Royal's respective contributions are among the collection's many highlights. Dong ably addresses the intersection of "life writing and the graphic novel," while Royal argues that the "neo-naturalistic . . . fatalistic reading of ethnoracial relations" distinguishes Dropsie Avenue from the sensibility of Eisner's other urban works. Jules Feiffer, a very different artistic witness to the Jewish American urban experience, receives his due in a lovely essay from Ira Nadel, who hails him as "the visual poet of interior angst and the choreographer of urban tensions," a fine description of Feiffer's sophisticated yet invariably bewildered characters' extravagantly frenzied and whimsically neurotic interactions with their environment (he calls them "victims of misfortune and heroes of endurance"). For Nadel, "what Feiffer explains is the inability to explain. His characters collapse into self-defeat. The explanatory agencies of family, institutions, and psychology fail to help. The self is left flailing."Other gems include Eli Valley's gleefully provocative comic "Jews and Superheroes," a witty sendup of Jewish American literary tropes and preoccupations. In another illustrated essay, Al Wiesner delineates how his early frustration at the lack of Jewish characters in the superhero genre inspired his pedagogical Shaloman series. Robert Weiner's essay addressing the superhero genre will appeal to those interested in the portrayals (oblique and overt) of Jewishness in the Marvel Comics pantheon; his account of their frequent flirtation with the Golem legend adds important new layers to that story. Tahneer Oksman, to my mind one of the most sophisticated and consistently interesting scholars in the entire field, delivers a penetrating comparative discussion of Leela Corman's Unterzakhyn alongside Mary Antin's ardently assimilationist 1912 memoir, The Promised Land. In addition to highlighting Corman's creative response to the "suppressed" voice of Antin's sister, Oksman addresses the artful ways that Unterzakhyn illuminates the immigrant's experience with "the vernacular . …

This article introduces the "word portrait," a subgenre of life writing often focused on depicting famous writers. These portraits emphasized visuality through a "hermeneutical" insistence on connecting visible bodily features with authors' creative productions. This subgenre frequently appeared in middlebrow periodicals of the mid-and late Victorian period. I argue that we can nuance our understanding of the relationship between highbrow intellectual tendencies and less culturally authorised critical practices by taking stock of the word portrait's operations and logic.

Through the life writing of Santram BA (1887–1998), a veteran Hindi writer and radical caste social reformer from Punjab, this essay illuminates a social history of caste in North India. Santram started writing in 1912 and published more than eighty books, including his memoir Mere Jeevan ke Anubhav . While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, the essay underlines that his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste, where on the one hand, he became a staunch advocate of intercaste marriages, and on the other, he enacted a language of caste reform and respectability with ambiguous implications. This contradictory straddling makes his life narrative both a complex and politicized form of resistance and critique of caste, while simultaneously appearing as an account of accepted caste models and messages.

This article develops an understanding of the role of life writing in putting marginalized voices on the record by examining the material and symbolic history of the book and its relationship with life writing. Taking two key points in the history of the book as its focus, the article argues that "the record" is a material and symbolic performative site that authorizes a life writer's claims to knowledge and experience. Through a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963 autobiography Les Mots ( The Words ) the article demonstrates the importance of the book to how life writers and scholars of life writing conceptualize the cultural, political, and social importance of telling stories from life.

Caryl Phillips is best-known as a novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. Although he has not published a full-length biography, what might be called a biographical impulse is diffused throughout his work. In this essay, I consider Phillips’s biographical writings – essays, novels, and hybrid texts – in the context of his own oeuvre . This essay complements my essay on Phillips as an autobiographer (“Plural Selves: The Dispersion of the Autobiographical Subject in the Essays of Caryl Phillips” [2011]). Phillips’s biographical subjects include writers, contemporary cultural figures, and historical persons, some famous, others relatively unknown. His novel Dancing in the Dark (2004) sets its protagonist, an actual historical personage named Bert Williams, in the context of the United States in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. In Foreigners (2007), Phillips reconstructs the lives of three black British subjects: Francis Barber, servant to Samuel Johnson, Randolph Turpin, champion boxer in the mid-twentieth century, and David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant who ‘lived rough’ in the streets of Leeds and died there as a result of harassment by the police. These men along with others described in Phillips’s work are, as my title suggests, migrant subjects, whether actual migrants or exemplars of displacement variously literal and figurative. As migrants, they are models for a transnational cultural enterprise like that of Phillips himself. An ensemble of disparate voices and perspectives that span the 20 th and 21 st centuries, the men and women who populate his writings constitute a collective, fractured, discontinuous biographical subject that evokes the “many-voiced chorus” that Phillips deploys in such novels as Crossing the River (1993). A sequel to the “new biography” that Virginia Woolf identified in 1927 with modernist literary practice, Phillips’s work proposes new models for life-writing in our own postmodern, postcolonial moment.

What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, "To survive is messy, elaborate, layered," contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. The term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S "Survivor," situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must "survive" in seemingly difficult and "exotic" settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, "survival" is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi's "autographic" memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and David B.'s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significant-ly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi's story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been-at least historically -infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.1Narrating Women's LivesI use the term "autographic" in reference to Gillian W hitlock and Anna Poletti's neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore's conceptual term "autobiographics" in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define "autographics" as "[l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials" (2008, v). As one mode of autographic writing, comics offer what I call here a "frame of recognition" for the subjects they portray. By "frame of recognition," I mean first the physical frame-usually in the form of a line-that encloses images and words in comics, and second, the way that these frames are figuratively deployed to redress overdetermined narratives of marginalized subjectivities, including women's lives. In women's life writing, the work of comics is particularly significant because of the personalized field of vision that the form promotes. As Hillary Chute suggests, "The types of challenges we see in women's graphic narrative are not found anywhere else-or anywhere else in a post-avant-garde horizon," and part of the political significance of these images lies in their complexity and avoidance of an "obviously 'correct' feminist politics" (2010, 4-5, emphasis in original). The reader can observe the subtleties of narrating womanhood in Persepolis with its careful unraveling of cross-cultural codes and expectations.Since the 1970s, women's life writing has gained richness and depth from the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, Wimmen's Comix Collective (1972-1992), and more recently, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (1999), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Need More Love (2007). …

While the verse novel is now established as a literary genre, the verse biography has not been similarly acknowledged, even though many of the formal tensions and strategies are similar. Recognizing that the work of “life writing” that such texts perform, and the relationship between historical fact and poetic representation that they negotiate, are distinct to the verse biography, this Special Issue opens up the genre as a field of study, within the context of biography and life writing studies more generally.