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.
The Limits of Life Writing
1st Edition
Edited
By David McCooey, Maria Takolander
August 14, 2020
In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal—engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less—then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end? Do we live in a culture of life writing that...
Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging
1st Edition
Edited
By Paul Arthur, Leena Kurvet-Kaosaar
June 30, 2020
The border between intimate memory and historical revelation is explored in this wide-ranging collection, which features original contributions from leading figures in the life-writing field from Australia, Canada, Europe, the UK, and the USA.The transmission and preservation of personal knowledge ...
Body Language: Narrating illness and disability
1st Edition
Edited
By G. Couser
December 12, 2019
As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment – we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature – autobiography – should address these common features of human ...
Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian auto/biography
1st Edition
Edited
By Felicity James, Julian North
March 22, 2019
A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives ...
Life Writing After Empire
1st Edition
Edited
By Astrid Rasch
October 18, 2018
A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the ...
Dissenting Lives
1st Edition
Edited
By Anne Collett, Tony Simoes de Silva
May 24, 2017
This collection brings together a series of essays that combine the public and private nature of dissent, stories of dissent that encapsulate the mood of an historical or cultural period, or of a society. Dissent is most memorable when it is public, explosive, dramatically enacted. Yet quiet ...
Trauma Texts
1st Edition
Edited
By Gillian Whitlock, Kate Douglas
August 07, 2015
These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: ...