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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.

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...

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.

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'.

"“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 "

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 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...

Clara Sereni’s writing journey began in 1974 with Sigma Epsilon and went on to flourish through the years with the publication of numerous inspiring and thought-provoking literary works. Many of her autobiographical and fictional texts delve into the years between 1968 and 1977, a crucial decade that changed Italy and forever impacted the author’s life and political thinking. In Via Ripetta 155, Sereni found a renewed desire to bear witness to those politically revolutionary times by revisiting the experiences of her private self and her interaction with the public realm. This study engages with the analysis of this last piece of the complex puzzle that encompasses the written story of her life, and argues that the text represents a final self-empowering act in which the apartment of Via Ripetta becomes the stage for a dialectical discourse between personal achievements and socio-political changes, personal conflicts and public turmoil.

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...

Through discussion of the author's final hours, final words, and final moments, this article enacts a metabiographical reading of the ways in which the death of Dickens has been written. It shows how major biographies from the 1870s to the present, including John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4), reinforce a particular narrative, and how more radical representations such as Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman (1991) seek to disrupt it. These accounts are discussed alongside lesser-known life writing and representations, from obituaries and the earliest posthumous biographies to family reminiscences and biofiction. The few existing metabiographical approaches to Dickens's life primarily explore his childhood; by analysing the significance of the public readings and interrogating the argument that Dickens caused his own early demise, the article refines the meta-narrative of his death. In doing so, it argues for greater recognition of the role played by friends and family as the earliest biographers, and of later biographers as mediators of Dickens's cultural legacy. The article also explores the broader narrative purpose of the attribution of his death to overwork, and concludes with an examination of the ways in which it has been used as a springboard to evaluate the author's afterlife.

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...

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 article purports to explore the autobiographical dimension of a recent publishing phenomenon, brainy books. It’s my contention that these books display a constant dialectic tension between their source (academic research) and their target (non-academic readers), and one way of reconciling both sides consists in resorting to rhetorical strategies in order to make their research more accessible. One of these strategies is openly autobiographical. Through two case studies—Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) and Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design (2014)—I study the various functions of this autobiographical dimension: perlocutionary, contextualizing, illustrative and finally autobiographical beyond functionality. It’s my overall aim to demonstrate that the authors’ choice to include personal anecdotes or even confessions in books primarily meant to spread knowledge to a larger audience makes brainy books a fascinating subject for life writing studies.

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 essay examines the English translations of the autobiographical writings of Teresa de Ávila — The Lyf of the Mother Teresa of Iesus (Antwerp, 1611) and The Flaming Hart (Antwerp, 1642) — to demonstrate the impact of her exemplary spiritual life on the development of early modern life writing, particularly in domestic contexts. Teresa’s autobiographical texts were mediated for new audiences: religious orders and lay readers, both Catholic and Protestant. Teresa quickly established cult status in large part through readers’ engagement with the record of her life. Analysis of her writings shows how they partook in a carefully orchestrated campaign of Counter-Reformation proselytization that established a network of religious houses but also a network of thought and contemplation across Europe. The key players involved with circulating her works were by and large lay people operating in close collaboration with houses on the Continent, but outside of the religious orders per se. While Teresa’s writings were a source of inspiration and emulation across the confessional divide and across the gender divide, she had a particular appeal for women, who often acted as crucial agents of conversion and reconversion, particularly in England. The article also shows how Teresa’s own protracted and intensive effort to validate her spiritual visions had the effect of both publicizing and authorizing herself as an authentic witness to the divine in the face of an oppositional, tradition-defending church. This must have had strong appeal in a century that was profoundly concerned with rearticulating the relationships between individual and collective state or religious authority.

The article underlines that the epistemology of the self and the practice of life-writing in India marks a departure from the Western conventions and modes of expression. Although there are resistances to autobiography from the Western theoretical standpoint, the genre meets with a twofold resistance in postcolonial milieu in its negotiation with the Indian metaphysics of self. Autobiography in decolonising India negotiates complex pathways between an ardent adherence to Indian epistemology and a potent resistance to the Western modes of writing the self. In a framework to understand the phenomenon of resistance implicit in autobiography in general and the internal resistances to autobiography manifest in the genre during decolonisation in particular, the article argues that such resistances within the genre have redefined the very idea of the self in writing, generated a nuanced notion of the self in narration, as well as challenged the process of writing the self in decolonisation.

This essay examines two unclassifiable texts—interweaving the genres of the essay, novel, poetry, and life writing—published in Japanese and in French in the aftermath of the triple disaster that hit Japan on 11 March 2011. These post-Fukushima hybrid works by Hideo Furukawa and Michaël Ferrier attempt to narrativize this unprecedented conjunction of natural and man-made catastrophes—which combined the unfathomable damage caused by the tsunami and the invisible nuclear radiation, which both induce a specific challenge in terms of representation—by blending not only the fictional and the documentary, but also the personal and the collective, via a plurality of voices (including those of victims met in the Fukushima region in 2011). This allows them to develop a critical, (bio)political, and historical perspective on these events, their causes, and their consequences, and to counter nationalist and, at times, misleading official discourses conveyed by the Japanese central state and the media. By so doing, they directly follow in the footsteps of trailblazers of disaster literature and of the composite genre of “notes” in the twentieth century, most notably Kenzaburō Ōe and Svetlana Alexievich, the authors, respectively, of Hiroshima Notes (1965) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997).

This essay discusses Seamus Heaney’s ‘Route 110’, from Human Chain, as an example of life writing as embodied in the very specific genre of poetry. His use of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI as a type of cultural unconscious is examined, and the connections between the two works are viewed as tesserae, which come together as type of mosaic. Heaney has described this poetic sequence as an attempt to translate parts of Book VI of the Aeneid. ‘Route 110’ is also read in the light of Heaney’s book-length posthumous translation of Aeneid Book VI, and all three texts cohere and combine to form the mosaic of significant aspects of his life, as seen from an older perspective. The sequence is read in terms of the connection between the two books as an attempt to explore aspects of Eros and Thanatos in his own writing Este ensaio discute "Route 110", de Seamus Heaney, publicado em Human Chain, como um exemplo de escrita da si incorporada no gênero específico da poesia. Seu uso do Livro VI da Eneida de Virgílio como um tipo de inconsciente cultural é examinado, e cada uma das obras é vista como tesserae, que são reunidas como uma espécie de mosaico por meio da tradução e de uma perspectiva dupla. Heaney descreveu essa sequência poética como uma tentativa de traduzir partes do Livro VI da Eneida. ‘Route 110’ também é lida à luz da tradução de Heaney do Livro VI da Eneida, e todos os três textos unem-se e se combinam para formar o mosaico de aspectos significativos de sua vida, visto da perspectiva da senioridade. A sequência é lida em termos da conexão entre os dois livros como uma tentativa de explorar aspectos de Eros e Thanatos em sua própria escrita.

This essay examines life writing by English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938), specifically Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939-40 and first published in Moments of Being in 1976, and Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. This comparative study explores how both women establish selfhood amid competing pressures vying for their minds and bodies; how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies; how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their life writing; and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits. Reading Woolf and Zitkala-Ša together yields fresh insights into the intersections of race, class, gender, and feminism in women’s writing. Este ensaio examina as escritas de si da autora inglesa Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) e da escritora Yankton Dakota Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938), especificamente o memoir de Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past", escrito em 1939-40 e publicado pela primeira vez em Moments of Being, em 1976, e os ensaios autobiográficos de Zitkala-Ša, publicados no Atlantic Monthly em 1900. Este estudo comparativo explora como ambas as mulheres estabelecem suas individualidades em meio a pressões concorrentes que competem por suas mentes e corpos; como a figura de suas mães e a perda materna moldam suas autobiografias; como lugares físicos e psicológicos e o deslocamento influenciam suas escritas de si; e como questões relativas ao público leitor afetam seus autorretratos literários. Ler Woolf e Zitkala-Ša juntas produz novos insights sobre as interseções de raça, classe, gênero e feminismo na escrita das mulheres.

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.

Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute t...

In this reflection on his recently published book, Hedley Twidle explores historical and theoretical approaches to the question of non-fiction in South African literature. Experiments with Truth re...

This article significantly adds to the literature on the value of financial accounts, demonstrating their worth as both an autobiographical and biographical source. It argues that elite accounts ca...

It is well known that one of the great literary genres in Tibet was that of autobiography. This paper commences with some observations of what might be referred to as ‘encapsulated’ or ‘nested’ aut...

This article presents imaginative agency as a new theoretical concept with great potential for life writing studies, especially digital life writing. It draws on a wide range of concepts and contexts to discuss selective histories and workings, proposing ways in which imaginative agency can fit into philosophical and aesthetic debates about capability, performativity, ethics and artificial intelligence. I argue for making a distinction between imaginative agency and creativity, owing to the monetizing of much creative activity. I explore agency in relation to aesthetic human capability, through comparison to the non-human, particularly whether bots can demonstrate imaginative agency in art and literature, and through questions of ethical agency in online practices like trolling and malware. Contexts relevant to imaginative agency in digital and social media practices, such as algorithms, crowdsourcing and augmented reality, are explored in terms of political considerations which tie cultural creation to wealth creation— a shackling from which imaginative agency can provide some liberation.

Scholars and critics of modernist life writing are probably acquainted with two foundational essays by Virginia Woolf: ‘The New Biography,’ written in 1927 as a review of Harold Nicolson’s Some Peo...

How do fictional tactics operate in what is often simplistically termed the “factual” or referential world of autobiographical discourse? Many narratologists view the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as distinctive to metafictional texts and constitutive of “fictional” narration, which they posit in antithesis to “factual” narration. But regarding autobiographical narrative only within the realm of fact ignores its complexity. While some theorists of autobiographical narrative have read it through the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia, as elaborated by Paul de Man in characterizing its “de-facement” of subjectivity, we argue that the figure of metalepsis operates productively in autobiographical narrative, particularly hybrid and experimental texts. The use of metalepsis shifts levels or layers of narration across temporal and spatial planes in ways that confuse its diegetic and metadiegetic levels. That is, autobiographical narrative, while filtered through the récit factuel, is not consistently fixed in an extratextual, ontologically unified, referential world. We pursue this argument by exploring four cases: the circuit of transfer in incomplete conversion narrative (Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson); palimsistic seepage between the Bildungsroman and trauma narrative (Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius); narrative collision of “parallel universes” (Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted); and unstable witness to collective trauma by a second-generation narrator (Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale). Recent critical studies of metalepsis also probe how it presses at the limits of referentiality in life narratives by J. M. Coetzee, Javier Marías, and Christine Brooke-Rose. In sum, autobiographical narrative is by no means a referential, “monologic” mode easily differentiated from the dialogism and metadiscursivity of the novel; rather, it is a mode unsettled by figural, discursive, and temporal boundary-crossing.

The British musician Robert Wyatt has released two top 40 hits and, in 1974’s Rock Bottom, at least one album that features in the popular music canon. Wyatt has performed on Top of the Pops and has appeared on several magazine covers. Wyatt is not an archetypal celebrity in the terms outlined by celebrity theorists, in that the media continues to focus primarily on his public rather than private life; yet he has certainly achieved cult status among popular music fans. In this article, I critically reflect on the experience of writing Wyatt’s biography, focusing in particular on challenges and opportunities related to the book’s authorised status. While authorised biography has been criticised as ‘autobiography in disguise,’ I argue that there is in fact a clear distinction between authorised biography and ghostwritten autobiography, a distinction I frame with reference to the paratext and the autobiographical pact as well as the musical notion of polyphony. Though I focus primarily on my biography of Wyatt, my reflections shed new light on the broader interconnections of celebrity and life writing, particularly in relation to the relatively neglected topic of authorised biography.

‘[T]ell me what you forget and I will tell you who you are,’ Marc Auge challenges his readers in Les forms d’oubli, and it is this challenge with which Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir begins Representat...

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston é um texto-chave que apoia a reputação de Siegfried Sassoon como o maior escritor britânico sobre a Grande Guerra. Críticos, no entanto, não chegaram a um consenso sobre se essas "memórias" levemente ficcionais representam relatos verdadeiros da guerra, descritos por Sherston / Sassoon, ou se são construções ficcionais. Além disso, críticos ainda não explicaram as diferenças entre Memoirs e a poesia de guerra de Sassoon, ou entre o que Sherston declara como objetivos a serem celebrados e seu relato completo. Este artigo disseca a adaptação da poética de comemoração da linha de frente de Sassoon em Memoirs: lê a nova aplicação dessa poética em Memoirs por meio de suas dificuldades de composição, sua dependência de seus próprios escritos do tempo de guerra e a relação incômoda da escrita de si com a verdade. Como mostro, Sherston tem mais em comum com seu autor do que Sassoon pretendia, mas diferenças permanecem; ainda assim, suas memórias têm tanto direito a esse título quanto qualquer outro texto na língua.