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.
Edited
By Alexandra Effe, Arnaud Schmitt
December 26, 2022
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 ...
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 ...
Edited
By Kylie Cardell
November 30, 2021
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. ...
Edited
By Hywel Dix
October 09, 2020
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 ...
Edited
By Lucia Galli, Franz Xaver Erhard
February 16, 2021
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 ...
Edited
By Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak
November 05, 2019
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 ...
Edited
By D. L. LeMahieu, Christopher Cowley
December 04, 2018
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 ...
Edited
By David McCooey, Maria Takolander
June 05, 2018
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...
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 ...
Edited
By Paul Arthur, Leena Kurvet-Kaosaar
September 11, 2018
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...
Edited
By G. Couser
October 17, 2017
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 ...
Edited
By Astrid Rasch
November 25, 2016
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 ...
