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.

Women's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women's archives in Canada.

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.

Examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women, such as L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain, to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame and in writing about that experience.

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.

My Basilian Priesthood is a memoir of Michael Quealey's six years in the order in the 1960s. During his priesthood, Quealey was director of the Newman Centre at the University of Toronto and engaged in reforming the mass and in other theological matters. The 1960s was a time of questioning traditions, including the role of Biblical criticism, the nature of liturgy, the place of women in the Church and in society, and the power of community living and decision-making. Quealey was deeply involved in all these matters, and sought to fulfill his commitment to service and balance that with his faith and vows of obedience to the institution of the Church. Written decades after the events he describes, the book is his reflection on the excitement of the times and the tensions created when tradition encountered new ideas and new forms of communal living. Here's a story that blends Toronto history with Catholic Church history and an inside look at 1960s counterculture.

Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in post-war East Germany, Johanna Krause (19072001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story. Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and factories. In 1933, when she came to the defence of a Jewish man being beaten by the brownshirts, Krause was jailed for insulting the Furer After a secret wedding in 1935, she was arrested again with her husband, Max Krause, for breaking the law that forbade marriage between a Jew and an Aryan. In the years following, Johanna endured many atrocitiesa forced abortion while eight months pregnant and subsequent sterilization, her incarceration in numerous prisons and concentration camps, including Ravensbr"e;ck, the notorious womens camp near Berlin, and a death march. After the war, the Krauses took part enthusiastically in building the new socialist republic of East Germanyuntil 1958, when Johanna recognized a party official as a man who had tried to rape and kill her during the war. Thinking the communist party would punish the official, Joanna found out whose side the party was on and was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks. Both she and her husband were jailed and their business and belongings confiscated. After her release she lived as a persona non grata in East Germany, having been evicted from the communist party. It was only in the 1990s, after the reunification of Germany, that Johanna saw some justice. Originally published as Zweimal Verfolgt , the book is the result of collaboration between Johanna Krause, Carolyn Gammon, and Christiane Hemker. Translated by Carolyn Gammon, Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted will be of interest to scholars of auto/biography, World War II history, and the Holocaust.

Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory.

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.