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This essay investigates Soviet-era homesites in the Baltic states as combinations of home imaginaries and people's affective, sensorial relationship to the materiality of their home space. The aspect of relationality is foregrounded: the primary level of meaning-making as regards one's quotidian home life, the article suggests, takes place at the level of comparative spatial intimacies—that is, in relation to one's own bodily movement in space and the objects, locations, impressions, but also the ideas, norms, and values encountered and embedded in these movements. Home experience unfolds on the scene of comparative studies, where different homes form dialogues and chains of movement in space. Both intimacies and imaginaries emerge as multiscalar, being deeply personal and closely family related, but also generational and class related, and including also transnational and/or officially endorsed ideas and values. The scene of comparative intimacies is exemplified on the basis of three homesites: Soviet prefab apartment buildings, pre-Soviet farm homes, and Soviet-era summer homes. The common homing model in the Soviet-era Baltics included at least two, if not three homely sites: while most people lived in urban environments, summer vacations were typically spent in a pre-Soviet farm home or in a recently built summer home. Of these different homescapes, each supported their inhabitants' identities in their own specific ways, each offered a different regime of spatial sensibilities, a different combination of sensations, relationscapes, and imaginaries. The essay accommodates methods of geopoetics and includes analysis of fictional texts, life writing, and the embodied presence of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene," edited by Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess, delves into the intersection of life narratives and the complexities of the Anthropocene, emphasizing the unequal distribution of vulnerability among humans and non-humans. The book challenges traditional human-centered perspectives in life writing, exploring themes of relationality, ethical dimensions, and the impact of technology on personal narratives. While the collection offers innovative insights into posthumanism and ecocriticism, its theoretical depth may pose challenges for readers unfamiliar with these concepts, yet it remains essential reading for scholars and students interested in environmental studies and the evolving landscape of life writing." [Extracted from the article]

I use this narrative to trace ways in which writers such as Graham Greene and Michel de Montaigne escaped from tedium and unhappiness so that they could live better lives and write for greater pleasure and satisfaction. I then outline ways in which I have struggled to escape from the prison camp of strict academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun (1755–1842) was one of the most prolific and successful portrait painters in history. She was patronized by many powerful and aristocratic people of the age, most notably Queen Marie Antoinette, of whom she painted many portraits and with whom she had much in common. This included scandal for both of these women of the same age, particularly regarding rumored lovers. The Comte de Vaudreuil and the Comte de Calonne were two of these men painted by Vigée-LeBrun. Vigée-LeBrun also painted many beautiful self-portraits, including those with her daughter, Julie. Some of the best known are those that she executed in Italy after exile from France. These include the self-portraits that she did for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and for the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. She herself was so pleased with these works that she painted many copies of them. They include a copy of the Uffizi Self-Portrait for Lord Bristol, the Duke of Berry, and a newly discovered copy of the San Luca Self-Portrait, now in the Houkohl family Collection. Her travels in exile included many cities in Italy and also throughout Europe, including Vienna, where she painted a portrait of the Countess Bucquoi, amongst many other Austrian and Polish nobles. During her long stay in Russia (1795–1801), she painted almost every aristocrat of note, excluding Catherine the Great. She was also admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting in Saint Petersburg, one of many Art Academies to grant her membership. Her many works (660 portraits, 200 landscapes mostly in pastel, and history paintings), show a progression of style from a lush late rococo to a drier neo-classical style and eventual romanticism, indicative of the changes in style throughout her long life. Pardoned by Napoleon, she returned to Paris in 1802, concentrating in her later life on the writing of her Memoirs (Souvenirs), which include many personal stories regarding her life and career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 demonstrated to many educators that writing or, at least, the type of writing often asked of students had been automated. While this rightfully raised a host of practical concerns, mostly around cheating, it should also raise questions about what kind of intellectual life the liberal arts will open once they are no longer centered on writing. In this paper, I argue that the automation of writing and the subsequent decentering of writing within the liberal arts is a threat to the liberal arts' intellectual life. I first argue that technics always participate in the constitution of the intellectual life, and so any transformation in the technical supplement will transform the intellectual life. I then argue that the technical supplement of the liberal arts' intellectual life is writing. Thus, the decentering of writing transforms and threatens the liberal arts' intellectual life. Considering this transformation and threat, those of us involved in the liberal arts need to re-examine what type of intellectual life we want to/can live and pass on. It becomes imperative for those of us in the liberal arts to recognize and to respond creatively to this existential crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and food writing are demonstrative and evocative of culture. The iconic South African Indian cookbook Indian Delights, for example, has been studied numerous times as an example of a cookbook as a cultural repository. This article provides a fresh lens through which to view the cookbook’s cultural and historical significance. An examination of Indian Delights allows for an investigation into the distinct manner in which food literature has been created by and circulated among specific groups of marginalised women, particularly in their embellishment of the text. The continued curation of personal recipe books in diverse formats, and the interplay between memory and documented knowledge, is explored through engaging with personal memories associated with Indian Delights. Infused with autoethnographic reflections, food literature is discussed as a realm of personal and communal cultural creation and recollection, as is how the communal sometimes gives way to the individual. Beyond considering food writing as a vernacular literary practice, this article highlights the role of women as glossators, recognising their ability to claim the margins as a productive domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it summarises the life and writing of the English diplomat Sir William Temple (1628–99). In a literary career that was strongly influenced by his life in politics, Temple wrote an array of different books, which sold well in Britain and Continental Europe. Second, it outlines the various ways through which we can identify the owners and readers of his works. In doing so, this article demonstrates the prominent reputation that William Temple once enjoyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through the shared act of durational witness enacted in letter writing. Reading the correspondence as a Butlerian account clarifies why subjects choose a relational form like letter writing for the self-representation of trauma. It observes how particular forms of life writing—letters and the eulogy, among them—provide occasions for the reciprocity on which the account depends, even as they unavoidably fail to make selves more knowable to an other than they can be to themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (2023) has declared that America is experi encing an "epidemic" and "health-care crisis" related to loneliness. Although Alfred Adler is not alive to respond to this dismaying situation, his life and writings offer a vital direction for understanding the nature of this epidemic and reacting appropriately. As Adler's biographer, I focus on four relevant causal factors concerning chronic loneliness among adolescents and young adults today: intrapsychic, familial, pedagogic, and wider societal forces. Relevant inter ventions are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an autobiographical studies framework, this paper outlines the persistence of a Malayan nation-of-intent through contemporary life-writings which revisit the 1950s–60s. The imagined nation constituting the Federation of Malaya and Singapore is central to two texts by ethnic Chinese writers with contrasting ideological leanings—Home is Where We Are by Wang Gungwu and Margaret Wang, and The Mighty Wave by He Jin. As putative citizens of this nation-of-intent, they textually perform nation-building by narrating their involvement in formal institutions and grassroots capacity-building. In outlining key elements of nationhood such as language, political participation, and historical consciousness in both texts, distinct conceptions of Malayan political subjectivities emerge through the performative and relational aspects of both texts. Overall, this paper draws attention to political implications while demonstrating the relevance of the "Malaya as method" approach in literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For authors who revisit their experiences of childhood to write stories for young readers, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. Whereas connections between memories and narratives have featured in literary studies and children's literature studies, the unfolding of negotiations between memory and imagination as authors create narratives of life writing is underexplored. This article examines how negotiations of memory and imagination unfold on paper during the writing processes for Roald Dahl's Boy (1984), David Almond's Counting Stars (2000), and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). While positioning itself in the field of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, this article aims to generate insights on the reconstructive approach to memory, which considers episodic remembering as imagining the past. By transposing the study of the dynamics of writing processes, or genetic criticism, to children's literature, I explore notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts held at the archives of Dahl, Almond, and Woodson to chart how they imaginatively incorporate memories of their youth into their life writing. As such, this research informs understandings of the narrative genesis of the authors' works, while drawing on the manifestations of their literary creativity in an attempt to broaden knowledge regarding memory and imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of studies on “cinephemera”, this contribution aims to investigate the intersections between cinema and private female writing, analyzing some sources usually neglected by historiography. In the context of the contemporary debate on the “writing culture of ordinary people”, I will focus in particular on the private diary. A device that, traditionally, is not intended as a tool for recording cinematic consumption, but is chosen by the writer as a surface of spontaneous self-representation, in which to record daily experiences and personal urgencies. The analysis of an unpublished diary written by a young woman during the years that led to the Italian economic miracle (and preserved at the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale in Pieve Santo Stefano), shows us how female personal writing can also become a means to reflect on family and social roles, on hegemonic values, on behavioral norms, and on social and consumer practices. The first-person diary becomes a place of interaction with cinematic imagery and star models while, in broader terms, it allows for a reflection on the social experience of cinema, in a historical moment in which it is at the center of the media and consumption system. On the border between public and private issues, the analysis of diary writing favors an “intimate history” of cultural phenomena, which enhances individual “agency” in the analysis and interpretation of broader historical processes.

Biofiction, literature inspired by the life of real people and histories, has become a popular genre. Rarely, however, have graphic biographies been considered in connection to this rapidly emerging (academic) field. To work out these connections, I want to analyse Manuela Santoni and Alessandro di Virgilio's 2021 Mary Shelley (a German translation of the original 2020 Italian text), a biofictional graphic novel about the life of Mary Shelley, while also considering other examples of the genre. I suggest that graphic novels that draw on real life people -in this case, celebrated author and one of the major influences on Gothic literature, Mary Shelley- make use of the graphic medium and create a new version of their subject. Shelley's relationship with her mother, early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, is a prominent topic of reflection for artists, as well as her relationship with her troubled husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her most famous creation, Frankenstein's creature. Biofictional graphic novels thus controvert the biographical genre and revision it instead as a way of reconnecting with the author in a visual way for a new audience regardless of their familiarity with Shelley's biography.

This article explores the narrative and memory patterns that underlie the evolution of city biography as a genre in the Indian literary context. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a 'spatial turn', emphasising the 're-assertion of space' across disciplines. This paradigmatic shift was characterised by a renewed focus on the concept of space in various fields of study. Besides, the publication of Nora's lieux de mémoire marked the second wave of memory studies, and enabled the world to remember and reconstruct the national history tied to 'sites' of memory. However, in the Global South, especially in India, the memory lens did not affirm national history. This study delves into common thematic tropes within city biographies, contending that they offer narratives of resistance to mainstream city writings. Biographers draw on autobiographical memory, shaping narratives of reconstruction, marginality, and absence/presence as everyday forms of resistance. Furthermore, by analysing Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi (2013), the article posits 'superposition' alongside the prevalent way of approaching the city as palimpsest. This textual exploration shifts the focus from the city's physical or represented aspects to the city biographer's simultaneous awareness of several historical layers, presenting Delhi in a continuum marked by both ruptures and continuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that a significant number of Iranians have lived in or visited the United States for more than half a century, they have produced very few accounts of their lives in or visits to the country. In the last decade, however, a number of narratives of travel to the United States have been published by Iranian authors, of which professor Mir Jalaleddin Kazzazi's New York-Letters merits special attention. This paper analyzes Kazzazi's text to highlight its distinctive features as a travelogue, which have led to the work claiming its own place among contemporary Iranian narratives of travel to America. More specifically, this study argues how, especially as a narrative in verse, the book challenges some of the conventional modes of travel writing; how it engages in its own mode of defamiliarising not only its content (that is, the all-too-familiar New York), but also the book's own epitext; how the author exploits a vast array of images from the repertoire of classical Persian literature to narrate New York; and, finally, how the ode narrative is interrupted to shift from the poet's account of New York to a lengthy panegyric to Persia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces my dedication, over two decades, to reconstructing the life of Captain William Mackay of the (English) East India Company. Mackay was second officer on an unseaworthy country ship, the Juno, which was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal in 1795. The ship did not sink entirely—the teak cargo in her hold was sufficiently buoyant to keep sections of the upper deck just above the waterline. The seventy-two crew members and passengers, after the main mast was cut down to lighten the ship, climbed into the rigging of the fore and mizzen masts. Only fourteen people survived their exposure to the elements for twenty-three days before the ship, serendipitously, washed up on the Arakan (Burmese) coast. My essay develops this uncanny situation as an extended metaphor for the task of reclaiming and memorialising the life of William Mackay, but also considers my own, perhaps pathological, attachment to his narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explain the tellability of routine videos on YouTube. It examines two videos by two motivational videobloggers, Kalyn Nicholson and Aileen Xu, whose channels include several videos based on the blogger's daily routine. The article suggests that contrary to generally accepted narrative-theoretical views, telling about a routine can create narrative dynamics without explicitly expressing singularity or uncanonicity. The article demonstrates how videobloggers make their mundane routine tellable under the pressure of the platform's commercial affordances and the directive of tellability by underlining the diachronic dimension of their actions. The article develops further philosopher Nils-Frederic Wagner's [2021. "Habits and Narrative Agency." Topoi 40 (3): 677–686] idea about the connection between identity-shaping habits and narrative agency by introducing it to narrative studies. This article uses a method that combines a philosophical approach and narratological text analysis. It argues that tellability lies in the diachronic dimension of routines instead of synchronic telling, and that the iterative narrative and second-person address in co-operation with YouTube's quantitative metrics indicate the masterplot of self-made YouTube success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Brooks, an early botanical collector in the remote south-east of Western Australia, and entanglement with that region are the subject of my research. I came to Sarah's story through a fascination not only with her as a person, but also with the place where she lived; the period of colonisation and dispossession of First Nations people in the late nineteenth century; and with the plant life she encountered in the global biodiversity hotspot of south-west Australia. In looking for ways to honour the deep entanglements between Sarah, the place she lived and the many hundreds of botanical specimens she collected, I found my way to ecobiography, a form of life writing that explores an ecosystem of the Self, comprised of all the interactions between the Self and the other-than-human world. In this essay, I explore the potential of botanical specimens as biographical source material—and as one piece of evidence of Sarah's entanglement with place. This essay also touches on the possibility of Sarah's specimens as historical archive, in order to approach her story with an awareness of the other-than-human, so that the agency of other living beings in shaping (human) histories can be centred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a (poetic) biographer who has dedicated considerable time to wading through archives and other research materials, I have often found myself wanting my biographical subjects to reveal themselves not only to be interesting, intelligent, accomplished, but to be 'good people' also, perhaps sharing my own artistic and political views of the world. Occasionally, however, I have been confronted with information that has stopped me short. And I have asked myself 'How do I deal with that?' Percy Grainger, for example, thought that blue-eyed composers were superior. And George Balanchine's name is frequently associated with poor treatment of female dancers (though many have jumped to his defence). Of course, life stories are much more complex than a singular focus on such details will allow, and a biographer must consider all angles. As this article will discuss – through reference to my own work and that of other poets – I am interested in how poetry's many affordances have enabled me to approach difficult material in ways that adequately distance my own moral judgement from the text and instead encourage a more active readerly engagement with facts and/or ambiguous information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two Chinese trans memoirs, Jin Xing's Shanghai Tango (2007) and Lei Ming's Life Beyond My Body (2016), present different possibilities of transnationality and transnormativity within the Chinese context of the pre-Covid-19 era. While both memoirs follow a Western structure of traditional trans memoirs, their embracing of Marxist and nationalist rhetoric or Christian concepts of the body present a significant departure from the traditional Western model. Jin is able to achieve the Chinese version of transnormativity approved by the Chinese state and live as an openly trans person who disavows politics; Lei remains 'stealth' and finds solace in a Christian discourse of androgyny. The texts are influenced by Western ideals of transness and medical transition, as well as neoliberal capitalism and Western religion, and are framed and formatted in English by Western editors and for Western readers. The iterations of transtopia that Lei and Jin find at the end of their narratives, however, are rooted in a sense of belonging to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps out the relationship between language and objects in life writing by Patti Smith. It examines anchoring effects of books, images, and nameless small things and foregrounds how they allow Smith to accommodate change. Using distinct media and distinct material environment, Smith expounds contexts for self-exploration. The article outlines interactions of media as sources of writing and creativity, it highlights the importance of excess in calling into question essential assumptions about selfhood. It argues that media allow Smith to turn outwards and expand into the world, also to engage the world. Smith's object-based life writing testifies to the achievement of self-realization and good life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By closely reading Ravi Thornton's graphic memoir, HOAX Psychosis Blues, as a testament to her brother Rob's decade-long battle with schizophrenia, this article dwells on the intersection of life writing and graphic medicine in comics to discuss how comics provide an expanded opportunity to visualise the (in)visible territory of schizophrenia. The aim here is first to examine the ways in which Thornton endeavours to contextualise the poetic narrative of Rob's mental illness through stylistic features of comics; and, second, to illuminate the confessional aspect of Rob's poetic evocations to understand how schizophrenia imposes practical limitations on the everyday life of the sufferer. Using Foucault's conceptualisation of clinical gaze and drawing on insights from conceptual metaphor theory, this article examines how a tangible tapestry of visual illustrations, symbols, and metaphors interprets the grave realm of Rob's thoughts more powerfully and critiques the rigid standards of psychiatric treatment. Ultimately, the article intends to explain how, by illustrating the metamorphosis of Rob's body into a butterfly, the narrative provides a sense of hope and vitality for other sufferers that medical reasoning fails to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project uses diary writing as a methodology for undertaking research into 11 diaries of women writers. Part autoethnography, part critical discussion, my diary diary charts a month of reading diaries, reading about diaries and keeping a diary every working day. The curated journals are read in relation to each other to try to understand legacies of how the diary form has allowed them to write themselves while also contributing to wider knowledge about women's lives and feminisms. This essay seeks discussion of the diary form and evidence of the lived experiences of women within the journals, charting how societal expectations and conventions around what women's role should be, within a range of historical contexts, is often in conflict with the individual's desire for self-development, creativity and a meaningful life. The diary provides a space for rebellion, for living the desired (private) life of thought and opinion and self-expression. By bringing individual works together into a curated lineage of women's diaries, I seek affinities, connections and the role the diary plays in both writing the self and also understanding the context of women's writings on their own lives, offering my diary diary as part of this ongoing feminist work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas many indigenous and non-western cultures see plants and humans as connected, western worldviews tend to disregard plants as material commodities. Plant non-thinking of this kind is increasingly being challenged in response to the environmental threats arising from human exceptionalism. This essay investigates garden narratives as a form of more-than-human life writing which depicts plant–human relations as mutually transformative and reciprocal. I argue that garden narratives pioneer such a rethinking as a win-win scenario. The positive developments garden writers document are consistent with a concept put forward in environmental psychology: transilience. Making reference to five recent western garden narratives I show how plant encounters can help us move towards an emerging environmental culture which emphasises more-than-human embeddedness and embraces symbiotic over competitive relations.

For authors who revisit their experiences of childhood to write stories for young readers, imaginatively drawing on memories plays a prominent role in the creative process. Whereas connections between memories and narratives have featured in literary studies and children’s literature studies, the unfolding of negotiations between memory and imagination as authors create narratives of life writing is underexplored. This article examines how negotiations of memory and imagination unfold on paper during the writing processes for Roald Dahl’s Boy (1984), David Almond’s Counting Stars (2000), and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). While positioning itself in the field of cognitive literary studies and the archival study of creative writing processes, this article aims to generate insights on the reconstructive approach to memory, which considers episodic remembering as imagining the past. By transposing the study of the dynamics of writing processes, or genetic criticism, to children’s literature, I explore notes, mindmaps, manuscripts, and typescripts held at the archives of Dahl, Almond, and Woodson to chart how they imaginatively incorporate memories of their youth into their life writing. As such, this research informs understandings of the narrative genesis of the authors’ works, while drawing on the manifestations of their literary creativity in an attempt to broaden knowledge regarding memory and imagination.

In both her life and her writing, Constance Debré challenges the conventional norms of gender, class and identity. In her 2018 work, Play boy, Debré intertwines her personal and literary coming out as a lesbian, marking a radical departure from the life she had been living until that point. In her subsequent works, Love Me Tender (2020) and Nom (2022), Debré further rejects traditional roles related to family, career and motherhood. This article examines Debré’s engagement with queer praxis as an author, interpreting this trilogy as a counter-narrative that resists dominant cultural scripts, particularly those tied to heteronormativity and bourgeois values. By foregrounding her rejection of societal norms, Debré constructs a narrative of autonomy that challenges fixed identities and advocates for an ambiguous freedom found in solitude. Through her ongoing life-writing project, Debré crafts an antinormative self-portrait and offers an alternative vision of individual experience living within and against societal structures. This approach provides a critical lens for examining the role queer praxis plays in life writing, situating Debré within broader discussions of resistance in contemporary French autofiction as she disrupts gendered, sexual and class-based expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the life writing genres of autoethnography and autotheory, this article reflects on the author's enduring friendships with research participants in El Salvador and Cuba through the seminal anthropological concept of the gift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iberoromania is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Throughout her illustrious creative and scholarly career, which spanned over five decades, French-Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1934-2024) earned a reputation as an iconoclast, a rebel disdainful of conventions and averse to simplistic formulas. A habitual provocateur, Condé reveled in her role as a rule-breaker, who challenged Negritude's masculinist discursive norms, and ushered in a paradigm shift in the prevailing vision of Africa as central to Caribbean cultural formation. This study examines the place of African diasporic literary traditions in La vie sans fards (2012). A confessional tale delivered in a taut, propulsive narrative brimming with equal amounts of tragic intensity and dramatic energy, the memoir traces Condé's eventful life in Africa in the turbulent decade of the sixties. I am especially interested in Condé's evocation of a vast array of African diasporic writers as inspirational in her own artistic development, and as crucial to the awakening of her diasporic vision. It is my contention that Condé's bold, radical departure from her earlier reactions vis-à-vis the African literary landscape demands attention. Considering the author's proclaimed goal to unravel the absolute, complete truth, this essay situates Condé's reminiscences within the broader context of a veritable boom in life writing and its study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational approach known as positive education emerged from positive psychology and frequently attributes its conception of flourishing to Aristotelian eudaimonia. This is a point of contention between scholars who see positive psychology's flourishing as an epithet of Aristotelian virtues and others who have identified critical divergences between the philosophical foundations of positive psychology and Aristotle's normative ethics. Few scholars have examined whether adolescent understandings of flourishing reflect Aristotelian eudaimonia, and whether this is different in positive education students. This paper explores notion of the good life through the writings of 226 adolescents, 93 of whom attend a school that has implemented positive education. These are analysed through an Aristotelian lens, finding more similarities than differences between the groups. Both groups discussed relationships, emotions, and accomplishments, but moral goodness and virtue were not prominent. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of this for 'positive' education and the role it plays in nurturing flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the Italian comics landscape has been transformed by autobiographical comic artists like Zerocalcare and Takoua Ben Mohamed, whose works have significantly broadened the comics readership in Italy. The success of these authors, along with the rise of the non-serialised form of the 'graphic novel', has also influenced the production of biographical comics. These comics offer fresh perspectives on the lives of notable figures to a diverse audience. The unique narrative mediation by comics authors makes this genre particularly intriguing for examining how verbo-visual storytelling techniques are used to reflect and convey real-life scenes and experiences. This article delves into the biographical storytelling approach through a close reading of three graphic biographies authored by women and focused on female figures, Lei. Vivian Maier, Virginia Woolf, and Io sono Maria Callas, to explore how biographical narratives can be crafted to tell compelling life stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, Italy has witnessed a boom in the production of graphic life narratives dedicated to both well-known, internationally established public figures and victims of Italy's post-war history, whose memory has only recently started to be negotiated. Some of these figures have even inspired several artists, who have approached the life narrative genre from different angles. A particularly striking case is that of Primo Levi, whose life and works are the subject of three graphic narratives. In this article, we explore the extent to which these narratives address the complex figure of Primo Levi and how the multimodal medium of the graphic narrative can extend the transgenerational reach of postmemory by negotiating the memory of first-generation Holocaust survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humphry Davy was the most celebrated chemist of his day in Britain, but he has been absent from discussions of Romantic-era constructions of race. It is well known that Davy was an experimental chemist, popular lecturer, and, as has been recently explored by the Davy Notebooks Project, a poet; this essay expands this narrative to include his connection to transatlantic slavery and writing about race, which are neglected aspects of his life and writing. In this essay, I examine Davy's response to the slave-trade debates and for the first time his close family links to transatlantic slavery, focusing on his wife Jane's stepfather, the major enslaver, Robert Farquhar. I discuss Davy's writing on the chemical causes of Black skin colour and a draft essay on the climate in notebook 13F in which he constructed the racial difference of Black Africans. I argue that his essay can be understood by recognizing 13F as a school notebook used during his period of self-education and that it reflects the messy and unstable nature of writing about race in the Romantic period. Davy's racial thinking was influential and he was recognized as an authority on skin colour by his contemporaries, Thomas Beddoes, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Sir Everard Home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miron Białoszewski, an acclaimed Polish poet and playwriter, and Lech Emfazy Stefański, a poet, dramatist, director, and since the early 1970s a key parapsychologist in Poland, met first shortly after World War II. They shared a passion for avant-garde theatre, literature, and music, and were also interested in psychic phenomena which, though, manifested itself in their lives and writings with quite different intensities. This article seeks to provide an introduction to the role of the esoteric elements in their biographies, while at the same time situating their relationship against the background of political and cultural changes in communist Poland. The first part of the paper outlines Białoszewski’s and Stefański’s youth experiences and their collaboration in the Theatre at Tarczyńska Street. The second part of the article addresses Stefański’s contribution to the propagation of psychotronics in Poland; it also touches upon his literary texts; while the last section examines the encounters of the former collaborators in the 1970s, placing emphasis on the role of the blind poetess Jadwiga Stańczakowa in bringing the two men back together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a discussion of a previously unpublished letter in the Keats House Collections written by Sara Coleridge, the poet and editor, and the only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Presented here is the first transcription of the letter to be printed – addressed to the artist Samuel Laurence (sometimes Lawrence) – and an analysis of its contents in relation to Sara's creative writing and life. The essay considers what the letter might be able to tell us about the author, her writing, her engagement with the arts, her position as a woman of letters in the late Romantic/early Victorian period in London, and her health, both physical and mental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue on Spanish Sapphic Modernity, we introduce artists, writers, and performers whose women-loving relationships and cultural production were connected to and through Spain, Europe (Ireland, Greece), the United States, and Hispanophone transatlantic spaces (Chile, Argentina). In light of decades of Anglophone modernist scholarship on female-authored life writing (e.g. Radclyffe Hall's 1928 The Well of Loneliness), conversation about Spain's "las modernas," women writers whose works queerness intersects, is relatively scant. However, modern Spanish women found queer and feminist ideas through Anglophone readings and intellectual contacts (often in translation) passed within their intellectual circles. Within a Sapphic framing, we approach often intersecting explorations of feminism, sexuality, community, modernity, and nationhood from the middle of the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth centuries, opening them to cross-section with a broad range of positive same-sex affect not limited to "queer" and "lesbian." The seven contributors to this special issue situate Spanish agents and productions within wider modernist spaces of queer and feminist collaborations, conviviality, and coalition building in Spain, Europe, and spaces of Spanish exile in the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Owing to its gendered connotations of powerlessness, passivity and lack of agency, victimhood is an uncomfortable category for many veteran women activists from the left-wing revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on an empirical study of the autobiographies of women activists in Turkey, this article is framed by the activist turn in memory studies, which has shifted scholarly attention away from victimhood, trauma and suffering towards social movements and memories of struggles. It considers a form of 'activist victimhood' as an identity under construction. The article shows how veteran female activists in Turkey navigate this category and transform it for strategic purposes. Memories of imprisonment and state-inflicted violence have legitimised women's speaking out and have opened up a space for the circulation of women's life stories. The article describes how activist women through autobiographies navigate the gendered positions historically attributed to them, adapting as well as challenging them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies literary rhythmanalysis to six queer life writing texts from The incompleteness book, an Australasian anthology of writings produced in 2020 under early COVID-19 home isolation protocols. The analysis is steered by Halberstam's theory of queer time in articulation with rhythmanalysis as theorised by Lefebvre and Régulier. The paper includes discussion of these driving theories, followed by the literary rhythmanalysis itself. Across the six texts, two common themes arise. The first is geo-temporal dissociation. The second is an acute sense of pain stemming from social arrhythmias that preceded the pandemic but were exacerbated or made more noticeable by it. The concluding section reflects from a current day vantage on what these findings reveal about queer people's relationships to dominant social rhythms before and during 2020 and how this can inform future situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have regularly employed biography as a means to an end, that is, as a useful method for the investigation of some other phenomenon. But writing, reading, and collecting biographical memoirs has an inherent and not just an instrumental value. Linked to memory, biography becomes a way of recalling lives, including those not personally known to the reader, and remembering how one's own life and work is connected to those of predecessors and, by implication, those of successors. This article examines how biography can be used to foster an inclusive and diverse picture of the discipline which more fully appreciates the difficulties many geographers have overcome to pursue their geographical work, and the unnamed collaborators – colleagues, friends, and family – who supported them in their work. Portraiture is introduced as a complement to written memoir, as a subject which would bear further scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributors to Mere Light ask how 'light' falls in and through the non-visual medium of the literary text, illuminating that medium's potential to initiate an experience of immediacy. While we might look to the luminous inscriptions of medieval mystics for its template, a fascinating post-Enlightenment exemplar of this paradox is the literary 'self-recording' of the deafblind modern 'miracle' Helen Keller. 'Illustrated' with often surreal photographs that both marked their modernity and complemented their thematic preoccupation with the dynamics of light, Keller's nine autobiographies strove to replicate her primarily 'tactual' sense experience in graphic language while tendering apparently eyewitness images of light. Where these literary dissimulations bring the body of Keller's disabled I into view, they develop a complex 'sense of light' as vibrant, self-actualising literary metaphor, capable of moving between sight and touch, and thus beyond the limits of both. Projecting its speaking I as light's writing alongside illustrative photographs that projected that I as light-written, Keller's life-writing synthesises sight and touch. Epitomised in her experimental The World I Live In (1908), this was to 'photo' synthesise the mimetic pretenses of post-Enlightenment visualising technologies with a transhistorical disability aesthetics oriented around peripheral – hence invisible – embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals how contemporary immigrant authors challenge the conventions of autobiography as conceptualized by Philippe Lejeune in self-referential novels that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, storytelling and truth-telling. We investigate the reality-fiction binary in the works of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, W.G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, and Ocean Vuong, and show how their self-referential literary productions alter the way we perceive notions of truth and authenticity in contemporary literature. By combining a reader-oriented analysis with a postructuralist inquiry on writing and reading, we aim at providing a more comprehensive understanding of life writing in transnational immigrant narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life-writing by punks has grown at a remarkable rate and constitutes a significant new addition to the canon of punk cultural production that deserves an equal place alongside music, fashion, and zines. Punk has always sought to document itself in the form of recordings, film, photography, fanzines, and video. It is time to add memoirs to these archival impulses and examine how punk culture is now mediated and sustained by autobiography. Whereas punk life writing might be dismissed as so many nostalgic trips down memory lane, this article begins from the premise that writing about a life involves more than nostalgia. Considering punk memoirs as works that offer new ways of thinking about a life attached to punk, this article surveys a broad range of punk memoirs and asks questions that reframe some punk scholarship by emphasizing how individuals live within and outside of punk simultaneously. What are some of the dominant features of punk memoirs? What kinds of interventions do they make? How do they introduce and develop particular ways of documenting and thinking about punk culture and its legacies? How does life writing about the past transform punk in the present? What ways of thinking, lines of inquiry, understanding, and feelings do memoirs establish and examine as central to the thought of punk, in particular, and the study of culture more broadly? The article seeks to demonstrate how these trajectories might shift and renovate work undertaken by scholars of punk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider how we might enter into Partnership with Nature in "The Long Now" 1--as an ethical, relational and careful (Donald, 2016) response to the often fight/flight/freeze/finance-inducing narratives of our current times of ecological crisis (Latremouille, 2020; Macy, 2014) and profound change. With this in mind, we consider what it might mean to "think like an ecosystem" (Bringhurst, 2018, p. 31) in partnership with nature, in layered, recursive, complex, dialogical, spiralling, emergent and nourishing interdependent relationships. We incorporate autobiographical life writing (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009) and dialogue woven with poetic interludes and interpretive asides, as we contemplate how "each generation bears responsibility for upholding principles of justice, fairness, openness and hope in its own time, not for the past, nor for the future but for today" (Smith, 2016, p. xviii). As two teachers living in Western Canada who recognize that this "responsibility may fall in unique ways on the shoulders of educators" (p. xviii), we seek to nurture holistic communities of hope around possibilities for partnering with the natural world, oriented around and towards a just society, "enlightenment of humankind, harmony with nature and sustainability for all life on earth" (Horton & Horton, 2019, p. 90). Through various creative and holistic educational projects--such as a youth beekeeping club, seed saving for a changing climate, guerrilla gardening, planting 1000 Bristlecone Pine trees that may live 1000 years, and a community-driven Master Gardener Course--we describe and reflect on some ways in which humans may partner with nature to "invest in the millennium" (Berry, 1991, p. 1). The design and vision for these initiatives incorporate pedagogical principles and processes that invite others to re-imagine holistic teaching as a partnership with Nature for "The Long Now". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a creative collaboration, a dialogue between a professor and a doctoral student who dismantle power dynamics in the academy, demonstrating the "liberatory voice" (hooks, 1989, p. 29) through (a collective chorus of Black Womens' contemplative criticality (Canon, 2021; Holmes, 2017; Williams, 2022) and ART, or activism, research, and teaching (Tyson, 2001). Our work, rooted in the SOUL (soulfulness-oriented, unitive, and liberatory) framework (Harrell, 2018), makes a case for re-imaging the intersection of criticality and contemplative pedagogy by centering the historical multi-modality approach to contemplative practices evident in Black Women's cultural heritage tradition and pedagogy. In our creative collaboration, we use letter writing to express our journey within Black Women's onto-epistemology that results in memoirs, life writings (Evans, 2022). Traditional boundaries in the academy are disrupted by exploring our roots, soulful practices, intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), and culturally relevant and sustaining mentorship in teacher education. The creative collaboration results in a counter-narrative as a method (Milner & Howard, 2013) to develop an integrative, and culturally sustaining (Paris & Aims, 2017) approach to critical contemplative pedagogy (Kaufman, 2017) in teacher education, based on Black Women Educators (BWEs) pedagogy of liberation (spirituality and social justice) in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the autofictional works of Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa and Tamil writer Charu Nivedita employ similar strategies. This article provides the opportunity for readers to discuss how autobiography, autofiction, and life writing might evolve in the future. In addition, it seeks to discover the theoretical implications in the life narratives of the chosen writers' works. This article investigates the ongoing evolution of life-writing studies and their potential impact on a wide range of fields of study. These two authors share numerous similarities, most notably a meta-modernist storytelling style. Through autofiction, they question the nature of reality and construct an alternate universe. To create a narrative, one must demonstrate empathy and connection, as well as address the interrelationships between different ways of thinking and being. This article attempts to provide an overview of autofiction and examines how Mario Vargas Llosa and Charu Nivedita use it in their novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lyric essay has emerged from a long tradition of life writing that draws on a changing world to forge new forms and ways of expressing selfhood. This paper explores the trajectory of the lyric essay and the way its bricolage form allows writers to draw from our information-saturated lives to represent unique identity. In the context of care work, my research into and construction of my own extended lyric essay was undertaken to help make sense of parenting, caring for family members with disabilities, and navigating climate anxiety in order to see how the multimodal, complex layering of textual forms and sources could reflect the multilayered, complex responsibilities of my life. Since its inception, the lyric essay has been known for its experimental style and transmutability. This allows my research to not only create new understanding of care work in my creative artifact but to examine the scope and potential of the genre itself, having significant theoretical implications on the field of modern life writing. Through practice led research, my writing echoes the symbiotic relationship that the lyric essay has with the environment it draws from: my experiences shape my writing which influences my research. The fluidity of this connection is reflected in the segmentary form; literary research, social media posts, images, quizzes, and memoir are all incorporated to represent a multifaceted life. Here, we see that exploration with the form allows for experimentation with representation of the self, and the scope of possibility for this representation is broad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Experimental Life Writing, a special issue dedicated to exploring narratives that push the boundaries of the form. It provides an overview of the field of experimental life writing, as it is viewed in the contemporary, and homes in on the relationship between creative practice and critical interpretation of the genre. It goes on to discuss the conference from which the special issue was born, with its particular focus on placing creative and critical practitioners in conversation. The article concludes with a précis of the resulting papers, which range from coining new hybrid genres, to analysing spontaneous writing practices, and identity creation in writing, taking in themes as broad as gender, death, childhood, technology and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nietzsche (1844–1900) struggles with complexity and many-sidedness throughout his life. He is a nuanced thinker who offers fragments instead of a rigid philosophical system, yet he admires the 'virtuous energy' with which systematic thinkers, especially the pre-Socratic philosophers, express themselves. His ability to write with comparable energy is hindered by university philosophy, which privileges restraint and consistency. Therefore, he adopts a practice of spontaneous life writing in order to become simple and honest in thought and life. Inspired by figures such as Emerson, Diogenes, and Sterne, he grasps the 'nearest shoddy words' and continually produces new insights in disjointed monologues and aphorisms. Nietzsche's vague metaphors, loose language, inconsistency, and hyperbole stem from this practice, and his autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888), is the closest that he ever comes to rekindling the energy of the pre-Socratics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American biographer and scholar, Carl Rollyson, maintains that 'the focus of biography is on the subject, not the biographer, yet half the story of a biography is, of course, who is telling the story' [Rollyson, C. 2020. The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. New York: Blackstone, xi]. This article maintains that the writing process facilitates identity development by writing ourselves into existence. This experience is conveyed while focusing on issues of self-reflexivity and writer agency, alongside identity formation through writing our 'own' stories from unique perspectives. This process is explored through a discussion of the ways in which I have grappled with establishing a narrative voice while forging a personal sense of identity while writing my doctoral thesis, which is a practice-based project comprising a life-writing artefact presented alongside a critical exegesis. This article explores the ways in which writers occupy central roles within life writing, while underscoring the process in ascertaining issues pertaining to identity. Finally, this discussion concludes with the consideration of the ways in which the 'I' in life writing can be established, arguing for the personal experience that is inevitably embodied by the genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]