Books in the Life Writing series

Contributions to this book analyse material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories, and the book closes with reflections and poems by contemporary life writers. It was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This volume explores narratives of illness and disability using the latest critical theories and through the perspectives of patients, creative writers, and academics. It examines the intersection of trauma and disability and the ethical dimensions of narrative. It was first published as a special issue of Life Writing.

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. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary motherdaughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.

This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. It positions the essay as a unique nexus of creative and critical practice.

Contributions to this book analyse material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. It was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

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. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This book sets a new agenda for studies in trauma narrative by establishing dialogues between some of the existing and traditional subjects, locations and methodologies of trauma study and other contexts, histories and memories that have remained obscured to date.

This volume is the first to approach Tibetan life writing from a literary and narratological perspective, encompassing a wide range of disciplines, themes, media, and historical periods, and thus opening new and vibrant areas of research to future scholarship across the Humanities.

This edited collection considers the ways older women's life narratives redefine culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to grow older.

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.

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. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

In the age of social media, life writing is everywhere. But does this mean that life is limitless? The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into life writing by attending to the limits that are approached and sometimes crossed by contemporary writers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This volume explores narratives of illness and disability using the latest critical theories and through the perspectives of patients, creative writers, and academics. It examines the intersection of trauma and disability and the ethical dimensions of narrative. It was first published as a special issue of Life Writing.