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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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

The Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) is probably best known for her pioneering scholarly work on gender equality in Islam. This paper, however focuses on her life writing: her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994 and her reflections on its Eurocentric reception, which culminated in the publication of her work of creative non-fiction Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems in 2001. Written in popular genres in accessible registers, Mernissi’s texts translate her scholarly feminism into stories of the everyday in order to encourage her readers to see possibilities of feminist practices within and against oppressive social structures. Both texts deal with the way in which women’s agency is circumscribed by particular horizons of constraint determined by their social contexts and thus the texts contrast local, particular forms of constraint with more diffuse forms of oppression that characterise western modernity. This paper offers a reading of her harem childhood to trace some of the alternative modes of enacting small freedoms that the memoir documents. As becomes apparent in Mernissi’s reflections on the memoir’s reception, these achievements seem to be largely illegible within meritocratic scripts of success. In contrast, Mernissi asserts that care for self and other – via modes of storytelling, performance, artistic production and looking after one’s physical wellbeing – mark direct, albeit subtle, forms of resistance even if they are not recognised as such. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire, the well-known figure of Scheherazade emerges in Mernissi’s texts as a central role model for women crafting pockets of resistance and webs of care. In this way, Mernissi’s texts offers a Moroccan perspective on the debate of the conditions of possibility of ordinary feminist practices inspired by popular artistic forms. Keywords: Fatema Mernissi, life writing, Scheherazade, ethics of care, storytelling, Moroccan feminism

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.

The process of imperialism and colonialism was established on the covert idea of economic and political exploitation of the underdeveloped eastern cultures by the dominant west. With the process of decolonization, the marginalized and the poor have been given a centre space alongwith the reversal of the order where those who were the object for centuries, suddenly refuse to be subjected to misrepresentation and domination, and begin to constitute their own discourses. Literature serves as a medium of honest self expression and platform to express the true self for women. American society has triply disempowered and disenfranchised African American women on the basis of race, gender and class. Many African American women writers attempt to break down traditional structures and dislocate narrative strategies in order to re-examine subject identity and to demonstrate the complexity of female experience. By writing about their lives the marginalized are valorized and their oppression turns into empowerment. Life writing helps females to explore subjectivity and to assume authorship of their own life. The account of the life of African American women writers chronicles their frequent encounters with racism, sexism and classism as they describe the people, events and personal qualities that helped them to survive the devastating effects of their environment.

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...

Swimming, like reading, is an immersive activity: words wash away, and words arise. Engaging with writings by critics who are also swimmers, principally John Berger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article explores their writings about swimming in relation to how being in water can ‘conjure stories from the water’, and open up particular kinds of reflection and reverie. The fluidity of water spaces creates an imaginary that enables intellectually sensuous dreaming, while the ebb and flow of movements and identifications establish a poetics of swimming as a form of life writing.

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...

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.

This article compares the books about the Lifes of Thomas More written by Roper and Harpsfield and the work Tomás Moro by Fernando de Herrera. The comparison is taken as a case in point of the divergent early development of the biographical genre in England and in Spain. The three texts were written by Catholic humanists, but under different contexts, which produced different kinds of text. Roper’s and Harpsfield’s Catholicism, marked by a close contact with the Morean tradition, the English form of Counter-Reformation under Mary, and the Elizabethan reversion to Protestantism, makes them drift towards an early form of modern biography. Fernando de Herrera, however, sets out to write his text from the background of the Spanish Counter-Reformation and a different discursive and textual conception of life writing.

As those who write themselves, life narrators are readers, interpreters, and curators of the archival material, both intimate and impersonal, accrued during their lifetimes. These materials form an archival pre-life that is extended and complemented by posthumous remediations of their narrated lives. Personal archives may include writing in journals and diaries, digital exchanges on social media and blogs, documents, and images in photographs and drawings, as well as the ephemera of recorded memories and impressions; as this archive is activated in life writing, its texts project an archival imaginary. Once a life narrative enters public circulation, the archive of self accrues future ‘afterlives’ as it is edited, reframed, and remediated in subsequent editions and by translation into other languages or media for different reading publics, both during and after a writer’s life. The interactive relationship of self-archives and afterlives makes clear that the texts of self-life-writing, whether published or unpublished, complete or fragmentary, are objects of inquiry in movement – not transparent, stable phenomena that generate ‘truth,’ but dynamic sites open to interpretation in their textual afterlives. An autobiographical narrative is, thus, never just ‘the life’: supplements, remediations, and new versions are created in interactions with the practices and positions of new generations of readers. This essay takes up the iterative, interactive, and intersubjective dynamics of autobiographical archives and the temporalities of autobiographical afterlives in eight exemplary cases of life writing. Observing autobiographical archives in their histories of circulation, republication, and repurposing situates the question of afterlives as a mode of ‘beyond endings’ in larger debates about ethical reading, methodological constraint, and theoretical adequacy.

The liminal space occupied by partially sighted people is little understood and much misrepresented in South African societies. Inter-personally and more broadly, visually impaired South Africans face stigma, discrimination and numerous structural barriers to educational, social and economic opportunities. These challenges remain largely invisible to those who never experience them. In this paper, I discuss my conversations with four South Africans who, like me, are visually impaired. These conversations form part of my research for Unseen, a project that brings together my interests in life writing and in exploring different aspects of the experience of visual impairment. I weave substantial extracts from our dialogues together with my own insights so as to give a sense of the texture of participants’ reported understanding, ideas, feelings, and sensorial adaptations, and also to investigate the multiple and overlapping influences of class, race, gender, age, community, sexual orientation and family on each individual’s subjective experience.

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.

There is a distinct tendency within the field of psychological and psychiatric literature to cite illness memoirs as exemplary sources of insight into the subjective dimension of how illness is experienced. However, the epistemological reliability of such sources remains open to question: Do such sources indeed offer meaningful insights into the authentic experiences of patients and in doing so, provide effective coping and self-management strategies, or are they merely literary and/or popular constructs, the value and meaning of which are fundamentally indeterminate? In this contribution, I analyze three such memoirs: Floyd Skloot’s (1996) The Night-side; Rik Carlson’s (2004) We’re Not in Kansas Anymore; and Julie Rehmeyer’s (2017) Through the Shadowlands—all describing individual experiences of the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). As CFS remains a puzzling and contested illness, an analysis of these narratives offers the opportunity to explore the presupposed values as well as the limitations of illness life-writing. In this article, I map the academic debate on the epistemological value of illness narratives and chart the discussion on CFS since the early 1990s. Subsequently, I propose a double reading—a “medical” reading and a “literary” reading—of the memoirs considered. Finally, I suggest that the inherent indeterminacy of CFS life-writing is an important quality that contributes to a deeper understanding of living and coping with chronic, as yet medically unexplained illnesses. Reading illness memoirs, I conclude, reveals the rhetorical and cultural dimensions, as well as the ambiguities and uncertainties of such experiences.

The large wave of Polish immigration to Canada during the years immediately following World War II also brought the production of written narratives that reflect upon the process of migration and settlement in the new place. Although these migrants included persons from all across Poland, of different age groups, backgrounds, and occupations, the migration narratives share certain distinctive formulas and patterns, particularly in terms of their plot lines and narrative structure. Each story highlights the journey and its difficulties, the arrival and culture shock, the struggle to adapt, and finally acceptance of life in the new world. This article focuses on the migration experiences of Józef Bauer (arriving in Canada in 1946), Helena Beznowska (arriving 1948), Marian Pawiński (arriving 1949), and Erika Wolf-May (arriving 1953). Explored from a folkloristic perspective, these four narratives fulfill the four functions of folklore: entertainment, education, validation and reinforcement of beliefs and conduct, and maintaining the stability, solidarity, cohesiveness, and continuity of a group within the larger mass culture. Moreover, as folkloric expressions of culture, the narratives not only reflect our very human culture, but also reinforce our shared humanity. Research assistance for this article was provided by several interns at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, including Justin Devine, Samuel Jane-Akson, and Michael Sheridan. REFERENCES

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.

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 ...

This study argues that Indigenous Australian women’s life writings reveal the empowerment of Indigenous Australian women in terms of expressing their voices and experiences as Indigenous Australian women in Australian society. This study is a qualitative research that collect qualitative data from books and journals through library research. The data are analyzed by applying interdisciplinary approach and presented descriptively. The result of this study shows that Indigenous Australian women’s life writings, If Everyone Care: Autobiography of Margaret Tucker by Margaret Tucker (1977), My Place by Sally Morgan (1987), and Kick the Tin by Doris Kartinyeri (2000) express their political and educative voices in order to enhance their life and potency in Australian society.

“‘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 is a review of Laurel Richardson’s book, Lone Twin: A True Story of Loss and Found. The book is powerful – a must-read. Laurel’s stories, questions, knowings, and unknowings offer an insightful narrative around her personal and significant relationships, eliciting an evocative opportunity for self-reflection. It will leave you feeling a strong sense of connectedness; possibly to something missing or perhaps something found?

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...