Books in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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.