Life Writing
About the Book Series
Life Writing, founded in 2004 by Mary Besemeres and Maureen Perkins, is one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography.
Its title indicates that it reaches beyond traditional interpretations of biography and autobiography as genres belonging solely in the study of literature. It welcomes work from any discipline that discusses the nature of the self and self-expression and how these interact with the process of recording a life. Life writing is about expanding the ways in which we understand how lives are represented.
The journal has a special, though not exclusive, interest in cross-cultural experience. It also has the unique and unusual policy of carrying both scholarly articles and critically informed personal narrative. It is published four times a year and its editorial board comprises leaders in the field of life writing practice.
(In)Dependent Selves: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Life Writing, Slavery and Dependency
1st Edition
Edited
By Pia Wiegmink, Jennifer Leetsch
March 11, 2026
This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of ...
Autoethnography in the 21st Century, Volume II: Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness
1st Edition
Edited
By Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
December 26, 2025
Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume II, Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness examines hybrid ethnographic life-writing genres, including genealogical memoir, ...
Wounded Scholar, Healing Witness: The Value of Life Writing in Coping with Traumas
1st Edition
Edited
By Idit Gil, Stefanie Hofer
September 03, 2025
This edited book focuses on the role of scholars in studying their own individual traumas, exploring the complex interplay between personal trauma and scholarly engagement. It gathers a diverse range of contributions, including an essay, seven articles, and an insightful interview. The authors ...
Poetry and Autobiography
1st Edition
Edited
By Jo Gill, Melanie Waters
October 14, 2024
This collection makes a critical and creative intervention into ongoing debates about the relationship between poetry and autobiography. Drawing on recent theories of life writing, the essays in the first part of this volume provide new analyses of works by a range of poets, dating from the early ...
Autoethnography in the 21st Century, Volume I: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging
1st Edition
Edited
By Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
September 13, 2024
Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume I, Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, Belonging examines forms of autoethnography as a decolonizing and dehegemonizing ...
Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour: A Playfully Serious Affective Mode
1st Edition
Edited
By Alexandra Effe, Arnaud Schmitt
August 26, 2024
Autofiction is often associated with humour, irony, and play. Moreover, authors of autofictional texts are frequently criticised for a lack of seriousness or for failing to straightforwardly and in their own voice engage with a given topic. Yet very few autofictional texts are exclusively, or even ...
Career Construction Theory and Life Writing: Narrative and Autobiographical Thinking across the Professions
1st Edition
Edited
By Hywel Dix
September 25, 2023
This volume applies the insight and methods of career construction theory to explore how autobiographical writing is used in different professional careers, from fiction and journalism to education and medicine. It draws attention to the fact that a career is a particular kind of artefact with ...
Essays in Life Writing
1st Edition
Edited
By Kylie Cardell
September 25, 2023
This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. Life Narrative is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field defined through attention to diverse styles of personal and auto/biographical narration and to subjectivity and ethics in acts of self-representation. ...
The Selfless Ego: Configurations of Identity in Tibetan Life Writing
1st Edition
Edited
By Lucia Galli, Franz Xaver Erhard
September 25, 2023
The essays collected in The Selfless Ego propose an innovative approach to one of the most fascinating aspects of Tibetan literature: life writing. Departing from past schemes of interpretation, this book addresses issues of literary theory and identity construction, eluding the strictures imposed ...
Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives
1st Edition
Edited
By Margaret O’Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh
May 12, 2022
This edited collection considers the ways older women’s life narratives redefine culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to grow older. Drawing on research from age studies as well as social and cultural gerontology, the contributors explore the subjective accounts and diverse voices of ...
Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections
1st Edition
Edited
By Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak
June 30, 2021
This book examines the relationship between life writing and celebrity in English-language and comparative literary and cultural contexts, focusing on historical as well as contemporary auto/biographical subjects.With contributions on the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington, Charles Dickens, Mary ...
Philosophy and Life Writing
1st Edition
Edited
By D. L. LeMahieu, Christopher Cowley
September 30, 2020
In this volume, scholars from a number of academic disciplines illuminate how a range of philosophers and other thoughtful individuals addressed the complex issues surrounding philosophy and life writing.The contributors interrogate the writings of Teresa of Avila, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John ...