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The article “The Voices of Life and Death in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems” uses Shakespeare’s dedications and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to discuss art and life, death and life, life-writing and death-writing. The relation between life and art, often framed in terms of mimesis, is fraught with difficulties, so that the connection between ethics and aesthetics is intricate. After briefly discussing the theoretical debate on mimesis, this article examines closely Shakespeare’s narrative poems, to discuss life and death as well as, to some extent, health, illness. The poems explore the themes of time, love, lust and death in speaking about life, in having a speaker create a narrative of life and death. Poems are about voice and this article examines how voices represent the life of the speaker (narrator, characters) in relation to the reader. Then and now, matters of life and death, have many facets, so these elements of life-writing, including death-writing, are multiplicitous and this article will try to suggest some aspects of the variety of representations, voices and responses.

Life writing is a narrative and discourse on the self from social, psychological and biographical perspectives. This special issue includes eleven essays addressing recurrent themes in life writing such as migration, medical narratives and cultural memories. Through voices of life, illness, suffering, disabilities and death, the authors not only question a traditional sense of self but also provoke further debates on human values and facets of identity formation.

Comparisons among cultures open up new perspectives. This paper is a comparative discussion of western Europeans and how they came to terms with the otherness of Natives in the New World and how that called into question their own authority as authors and indeed their worldview. This representation of the Natives is a recurrent theme. Often this representation and "translation" involved an overcoming of or coming to terms with other "barbarous" cultures as well as an inheritance from a previous empire or a rival. Questions of being there, of the rhetorical contract between writer and reader, and the typology of the Old and New World are among my concerns over the truth and lies that the authors and readers of travel accounts must negotiate. This might be an ethnology of reading or a use of ethnology to see the otherness within or the dramatic tension between self and other that writers and readers then and now experience. Primerjave med kulturami odpirajo nove perspektive. Pričujoči članek je primerjalna razprava o Zahodnih Evropejcih, o tem, kako so se sporazumeli z drugostjo staroselcev Novega sveta in kako so kot avtorji problematizirali svojo lastno avtoriteto ter dejansko svoj pogled na svet. Reprezentacija staroselcev je tema, ki se nenehno obnavlja. Ta reprezentacija in "prevod" sta pogosto vključevala tako premoč nad drugimi, "barbarskimi" kulturami - ali sporazumetje z njimi - kakor tudi dediščino tamkajšnje predhodne vladavine ali tekmeca. Problemi, kot so vprašanje pristnosti pričevanj, retorična pogodba med piscem in bralcem ter tipologija Starega in Novega sveta, me bodo zanimali z vidika resnice in laži, o čemer se morajo pogoditi avtorji in bralci popotnih poročil. To imamo lahko za etnologijo branja ali za uporabo etnologije, zato da bi uvideli drugost znotraj njih ali da bi uvideli med jazom in drugim dramatično tenzijo, kakršno so izkušali pisci in bralci nekoč in jo izkušajo danes.