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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 paper examines the relationship between memoir and truth, and the implications of that relationship for the rhetorical work that memoirs do. It uses the grounding example of Tara Westover's 2018 memoir Educated and looks at how the recreation of events within her life works both in conjunction with the way she portrays them in the text and juxtaposed against other competing narratives, such as her mother's 2020 memoir Educating. This essay continues the work done by literary theorists such as Phillipe LeJeune, applies the critical framework developed by Katherine Mack and Johnathan Alexander in their article "The Ethic of Memoir," and encourages the reader to consider the ways in which memoirs are rhetorically acting upon the culture at large through their narrative and emotional aspects. Master of Arts This paper looks at the relationship between memoir and truth in memoirs. Using rhetoric as its basis, it examines memoirs in their contexts using Tara Westover's 2020 memoir Educated as a case study. It looks at the way that memory is used to build narratives, and more specifically, the way that lived personal experiences are represented in the form of the memoir genre. In considering these ideas, this paper explores questions of objective "truth" and how lived experiences can be affected by internal emotional narrative, and by extension, how that emotional narrative is depicted in memoir.

This Australian-based paper offers a subjective academic narrative on the methodology of autoethnography as it is used and understood by both learners enrolled in creative writing higher education degrees and by novelists who draw on real-life experience and personages in their work in the quest for verisimilitude. Closely considering cases of writing in both ivory tower and real-world contexts, the qualitative and reflection-based study reveals that once writers move from the academy to the world of publishing, they are better able to write from experience, and can do so as long as they adhere to the 'ethics of care' that characterise their profession. Trained as autoethnographers to draw fictions from life experiences through methodological autoethnography, real world writers continue to follow the ethical tenets of consent, consultation and present and future vulnerability., {"references":["Tolich, M. A Critique of Current Practice: Ten Foundational Guidelines for Autoethnographers\", Qualitative Health Research, 20(12), 2010, 1599–1610","Carey, J. Whose story is it, anyway? Ethics and interpretive authority in biographical creative nonfiction. TEXT12(2) (October) 2008","Clandinin, D.J. & Connelly, F.M. Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 2000","hooks, b. Marginality as site of resistance, in R. Ferguson, M., Gever, T.T. Minh-ha and C. West (Eds), Out there: marginalization and contemporary cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 341-43","Rolf, W-M..Auto/Ethnography and the Question of Ethics. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1(1), 2009","Chang, H. Autoethnography as Method. (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008)","Muncey, T. Creating autoethnographies. (London, UK: Sage, 2010)."]}

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.

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.

This thesis studies the presence of Virginia Woolf as the protagonist-subject in a sudden plethora of contemporary biofictions published within decades or so from the end of last century. The main hypothesis of this research is that, while biofiction has been accused of as a necrophiliac genre that contaminates life-writing with fiction, it can transmit contemporary writers’ diverse outlooks on the protagonist-subject’s life and work and present responsible interpretive readings of the protagonist-subject’s life with novelistic techniques and imaginative creativity. While contemporary biofictions stage various, competing and even contradictory versionings of Woof, collectively they expand the scope of Woolf’s life and the contour of her self and explore those secrets and historical pasts that have no definite answers, thus engaging with reconfiguring Woolf’s afterlife. To substantiate these arguments and reveal how biofictions present what Woolf calls “the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggest and engenders” (“TAOB” 150), I analyse the following works: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Norah Vincent’s Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia, Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister: A Novel, and Gillian Freeman’s But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury. The first and second chapters intend to build up a theoretical context for this project. As a response to the surprising gap between the momentum this hybrid genre has gained since the late twentieth century and the dearth of scholarship in this field, Chapter 1 presents a systematic theoretical framework of biofiction by answering the following questions: (1) how do we define biofiction? (2) are there any generic features of biofiction and how do they help us to distinguish biofiction from its neighbouring genres? and (3) is biofiction fiction, non-fiction, or a hybrid genre locating in a spectrum of life-writing between fiction and scholarly biography? Basing on the premise that the “historical-author-as-character” tradition serves as an agile “thermometer” to the question of authorship, Chapter 2 centres on contemporary biofiction writers’ obsession with writing the lives of literary forebears and traces its pre-history alongside with the emergence and consolidation of the modern authorship. To interrogate the kinship between biofictions of literary writers and modernist experiments with life- writing and Künstlerroman, I take key figures for case studies, including Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. Set against this theoretical groundwork, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 seek to conduct textual analyses on the cluster of biofictions featuring Woolf and examine their different modalities of fictional reconfiguration. Chapter 3 focuses on Woolf’s “madness,” including her mode of being as an experiential subject of illness and the relationship between her illness and literary artistry, and interrogates how it is negotiated, re- purposed, and represented in works by Cunningham and Vincent. In Chapter 4, I examine the reconfiguration of the artist duo – Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf – in Sellers’s biofiction and argue that those ekphrastic episodes embody the convergence and mutual influence of the sisters’ sister arts and interrogate the efficacy of language and visual images as media for life-writing. Utilising works by Freeman and Parmar as cases studies, Chapter 5 demonstrates ways contemporary writers excavate Woolf’s public selves in the Bloomsbury Group and infuse Woolf’s reflection on such issues as selfhood, coterie, and conversation as art in their representation of Woolf. Finally, in the Conclusion section, I point out how contemporary biofictions collectively highlight the polysemy, nebulousness and contingency of Woolf’s life and character and exhibit a self that is porous, elastic, and multi-faceted.

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 open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This chapter examines contemporary autobiographical narratives which explore the notion of motherhood as the central issue in women’s lives. These narratives have been important in offering alternative discourses and thereby broadening the concept of motherhood. This chapter discusses them in the light of motherhood studies and theories about matrilineal narratives in contemporary literature. Works by two highly acclaimed Canadian writers are at the center of our study: Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (first published in 2001; 2008) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). Both volumes convey an ambivalence toward motherhood and lean on emotions as well as intellectual argument. Theoretically, the point of departure is Toril Moi’s discussion about contemporary life writing as an “exercise of attention,” and furthermore the feminist examination of the definition of motherhood and mothering in a social context, from Adrienne Rich (1976) to Tina Miller (2005). The texts discussed in this chapter contest different “cultural scripts” (Miller)—discourses that affect societal and subjective views on motherhood and gender.

While incarcerated on charges of prostitution, transgender activist Ceyenne Doroshow began to write her memoirs by hand, later to be published in 2012 as Cooking in Heels: A Memoir Cookbook. Blending recipe with personal narrative, Doroshow’s autobiographical cookbook plays with various genres and breaks generic codes, challenging the rules that govern literary production and reception in the West. Far from consisting of the sentimental reflections of a socially-integrated subject, as in the traditional Bildungsroman, Doroshow recounts the painful experiential history of a body for whom the public sphere offers no possibilities for social integration—indeed, upon whose exclusion the dominant social body is constituted. While physical and emotional survival are at the heart of Doroshow’s autobiographical project, ‘survival’ should not be understood as a unified subject’s teleological quest for limitless individual freedom. Rather, for the narrator, ‘survival’ signifies an ongoing struggle to resist forces of humiliation and erasure, to knot together meaningful social bonds, and, ultimately, the capacity to transform the world and change the situation of others. Through interpersonal, experimental acts—cooking, transitioning, autobiographical writing—the psychical and physical body is drawn, always in relation to the other, who can be a source nourishment and strength; but also a source of injury, shame, and violation. This article asks: what alternative models of identity, labor, and agency are put forth in Doroshow’s autobiographical act? In what ways are living and writing at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities generative of new or hybrid life narratives and autobiographical practices?

Previously published in Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 42, 4, December 2021 A large body of experimental evidence in the empirical sciences shows that writing about life experiences can be beneficial for mental and physical health. While empirical data regarding the health benefits of writing interventions have been collected in numerous studies in psychology and biomedicine, this literature has remained almost entirely disconnected from scholarship in the humanities and cognitive neuropsychology. In this paper, I review the literature from psychological and biomedical writing interventions, connect these findings to views from philosophy, cognitive neuropsychology and narratology and argue that examining established regularities in how narratives are structured can shed further light on the psychological processes engaged during writing interventions. In particular, I argue that the narratological concept of conflict can be applied to resolve patterns of seemingly conflicting empirical findings in psychological studies. More generally, I propose that an interdisciplinary perspective can provide a broader theoretical basis for understanding the psychological processes underlying the health benefits of autobiographical writing and provide directions for future research in psychology and biomedicine.

This article was originally published as: Latremouille, J. (2022). Grief-writing: Navigating ecological suffering through a relational pedagogy. Art/Research International, 7(2), 439-457. https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29669, It’s been a tough couple of years. Each one among us could list off the news headlines as a lengthy and overwhelming reminder. And each one among us could certainly curate a personalized list that amplifies and extends our collective sufferings. The past couple of years have left me wondering, “what could possibly be next?” I heed David Geoffrey Smith’s (2014) call to “reimagine new, wiser human possibilities” for our overlapping worlds of suffering. As an educator, mother, world-lover deeply concerned with all forms of justice, I share grief-writing: poetic stories of small-town sufferings through floods, stories of family hurts, heartaches and loss, stories of love enduring through hopelessness. I engage life writing and poetic inquiry to undertake a dialogue with my own heart-memories, my loved ones, my scholarly ancestors— towards hopeful pedagogical possibilities for healing.

[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.

The diary form affords multiple generations of women with a vehicle for expressing themselves, and is particularly germane to younger writers, developing a voice, and shaping a sense of self as they emerge from childhood. Charting her travels from Ireland to Bath, the manuscript diary (1796–97) of Charity Lecky is exceptionally useful in exploring intersections with other genres, particularly the novel, while also affording us with an adolescent’s observations on life, and on Bath as international marriage market. The categories of youth, gender, and nation all play strong roles in Charity’s evolving sense of self, and enable us to explore these intersections and how they can inform a young person’s sense of worth. Frequently dismissed by male contemporaries as preoccupied only with balls and marriage prospects, the voices of such figures were repeatedly marginalised. This article prioritises both these voices and the diary form itself, and fuses their legitimate interest in courtship with a concern and fascination with national identity, recognising the value of young women’s opinions, and demonstrating how we might better understand the evolution of personal identities through inclusion of such source material.

"“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...