Bøger i Palgrave Studies in Life Writing serien

This volume examines a selection of life writing in English by authors from the South West Indian Ocean, namely South Africa, East Africa, Mauritius and Sri Lanka. The two motifs that run through the chapters ¿ mourning and resilience ¿ are theoretical frameworks that have so far not been brought into conversation in this way. The combination of trauma studies and autobiographical analysis sharpens the focus of the discussions on Indian Ocean life writing, privileging an Indian Ocean imaginary that is transnational and cross-oceanic in its orientation and pointing to networks of connections that transcend the nation state, which is often the origin of trauma in the first place. Filling a gap in Indian Ocean studies in its close readings of trauma and resilience, the book also broadens perspectives on postcolonial life writing since little attention has been paid so far to Indian Ocean autobiographical literary products. By the same token, the volume also enriches the field of Indian Ocean literary studies by incorporating life writing as an aesthetic strategy which helps to configure Indian Ocean subjectivities.

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ¿fictions of gender¿, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ¿raw material¿, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in manyof the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.comChapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader¿s response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the engagement with and representation of the face across literature, photography, and theatre. It looks at how the face is an active agent, closely connected with the history of the media and the social interactions reflected in media images. Focusing on the dynamic period of the interwar years, it explores a range of case studies in Poland, UK, and the US, and examines artists like Stanis¿aw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Virginia Woolf, Debora Vogel, Sir Cecil Beaton, Theodore W¿adys¿aw Benda, and Edward Gordon Craig. Teresa Brü argues that these writers and photographers defended the face against threats from modern life ¿ not least, the media. She focuses on transformations of the face in life writing across a range of media and draws attention to the artists¿ autobiographical narratives.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures.

Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages.

This book is a timely study of young women's life writing as a form of human rights activism.

The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.

Addressing the fraught relationships between genre and gender, private and public, image and text, life and narrative that play out in the modern biographical tradition, Metabiography suggests new possibilities for reading, writing and thinking about this enduringly popular genre.

This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of ¿the autofictional¿ as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on ¿Approaches,¿ ¿Affordances,¿ and ¿Forms,¿ the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures.

This book is concerned with food autobiographies written by men from the 1980s to the present. After presenting a historical overview of the place of food within mens autobiography, this volume analyzes the reasons for our present interest in food and the proliferation of life narratives focused on cooking.

This book is the first full critical history of incognito social investigation texts - in other words, works detailing their authors' experiences whilst pretending to be poor.

This innovative volume establishes autofiction as a new and dynamic area of theoretical research in English.

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women's life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs.

This book investigates how girls' automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding.In thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts-in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities-show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories.By examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediation and autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative.

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women's narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe.

It provides contextual analysis through a survey of the different types of contemporary writing about the Great War, through an analysis of changes in the language used to describe combat, and through an analysis of those people whose accounts of the war were either excluded or marginalised.

Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition.

This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.

This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character's story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity. The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book examines posttraumatic autobiographical projects, elucidating the complex relationship between the 'science of trauma' (and how that idea is understood across various scientific disciplines), and the rhetorical strategies of fragmentation, dissociation, reticence and repetitive troping widely used the representation of traumatic experience. From autobiographical fictions to prison poems, from witness testimony to autography, and from testimonio to war memorials, otherwise dissimilar projects speak of past suffering through a limited and even predictable discourse in search of healing. Drawing on approaches from literary, human rights and cultural studies that highlight relations between trauma, language, meaning and self-hood, and the latest research on the science of trauma from the fields of clinical, behavioral and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, I read such autobiographical projects not as 'symptoms' but as complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath: commemorative and performative narratives navigating aesthetic, biological, cultural, linguistic and emotional pressure and inspiration.

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women's narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe.

It provides contextual analysis through a survey of the different types of contemporary writing about the Great War, through an analysis of changes in the language used to describe combat, and through an analysis of those people whose accounts of the war were either excluded or marginalised.

This book demonstrates a new, interdisciplinary approach to life writing about torture that situates torture firmly within its socio-political context, as opposed to extending the long line of representations written in the idiom of the proverbial dark chamber.

This innovative volume establishes autofiction as a new and dynamic area of theoretical research in English.

This collection of essays offers a stimulating insight into the practice of reading and the relationship between reading and writing in women's life writing texts such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel logs, and graphic memoirs.