Life Writing 

About: Life Writing is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Life writing & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 1448-4528. Over the lifetime, 681 publications have been published receiving 3276 citations.

Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative

Abstract: Paul John Eakin. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008. ix + 179 pages. ISBN 978-0-8014-7478-1 Reviewed by: Roger Porter ...

Letters as / not a genre

Abstract: With the rise of life writing studies, letters have become the subject of an increasing number of interdisciplinary analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common characteristics hold such analyses together and the peculiar difficulties they encounter in theorising a genre that perhaps, out of all writing practices, most exposes the limits of genre theory itself. The essay is written, appropriately, as a dialogue, in which Margaretta's Voice asks general, if not straightforwardly generic questions about letters and Liz's Echo answers them in relation to her current two epistolary projects, theorizing 'the epistolarium', and editing a new Olive Schreiner collected letters for publication. The echo here is a voice that, unlike most echoes, answers back in an argumentative way. While Margaretta suggests that letters are proto-genres whose distinctive yet infinitely malleable features can be best understood through the social and literary codes of relationship, Liz explains how, after her sce...

Revisiting the Narrative Turns

Abstract: This article reconsiders (self-)critically the constitution of the scholarly phenomenon called the ‘narrative turn’. Based on the intellectual autobiographical experiences of the author, it is argued that the turn may be understood as having proceeded in three successive phases: as an interest in narrative theory and research; as recognition of narrative inquiry as a field; and as an explicit identity concept. In order to resist straightforward chronology, it is suggested that instead of one fixed narrative turn, we should talk about at least four different turns with different agendas and attitudes toward narrative: firstly, the turn in literary theory in the 1960s; the turn in historiography following literary narratology; the turn in social sciences from the 1980s onwards; and finally a more broadly cultural and societal turn to narration. There is no simple plotline or causal chain between these layers; instead they tend to receive locally idiosyncratic articulations. Understanding the different agend...

Memoir: An Introduction

Abstract: G. Thomas Couser. Memoir: An Introduction . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 183 pp.+Works Cited and Notes Reviewed by: Susannah B. Mintz It was the best of times for memoir; it was the wor...