This review discusses Hannie Lawlor’s Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing (2024), which conceptualizes autobiographical writing as a relational form in which narratives of the self are shaped by the lives of others. Focusing on contemporary French and Spanish texts, Lawlor examines how intergenerational trauma, family memory, and ethical questions of representation are negotiated through first-person narration. The review highlights the study’s comparative perspective and its analysis of narrative strategies that challenge binary notions of voice, authority, and testimony in post-traumatic life writing, thereby contributing to ongoing debates in life writing and trauma studies.
The critical niche Sean Grass began to explore with his seven contributors before the pandemic has yielded a collection of essays that is at once wide-ranging and thorough. Indeed, Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market not only achieves its stated aim of recovering the “sense of life writing’s dense imbrication in the workings of the market” through its focus on the minor figures, but also explores an impressive range of genres and themes, so that it will even reward those readers whose interests lie outside the field of life writing. Today, life writing is an umbrella term that includes not only autobiography and biography but a great diversity of once “unconsidered” forms. Thanks to this all-embracing characteristic of the genre in question, readers can find in this volume discussions on autobiography, biography, journal and newspaper articles, as well as works of fiction and even uninscribed diaries, whose authors and subjects include not only famous white men, but also obscure women and people of colour.
Craig Howes has been a Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa since 1980. He has been the co-editor for Biography: An International Quarterly since 1994 and the director of the Center for Biographical Research since 1997. In 1999 Craig became one of the founding members of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) and has been managing the IABA mailing list ever since. He was a co-producer for the television documentary series Biography Hawaiʻi, and his book Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to their Fight (1993) was named an Outstanding Academic Book in American History for 1995 by Choice. Craig’s upcoming publication A History of British Comic and Satiric Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Laughter and Attack will be published in 2027.
In this personal reflective essay, I try to explore some of the most pertaining facets of my writing career over more than two decades to date. Including and interweaving extracts of prose fiction and of verse, I examine the trajectory of my writerly motives across all the different genres of my writing career, whether in academic writing, literary journalism, poetry or prose fiction. The common denominator and the common sense that undergirds, I realize in retrospect, all my writerly endeavors is a riveted relationship to the English language itself. Part of my argument in this autobiographical reflective article is thus that by way of my vocation as a writer what feels like my truest ‘autobiography’ emerges from my writerly choices of configuration. A writerly life is limned in brief here as a life embedded in the necessary and inescapable choices a writer makes as part of a lifelong quest evinced by his evolving poetics.
Five refugee students from Elimisha Kakuma write about their experiences of displacement. Elimisha Kakuma is a program that provides access to higher education opportunities for high school graduates in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The authors reflect on their past, present and future lives, and how displacement has affected their sense of individual and collective identities. The contributions to this collective piece were written by Agot Abraham Deng, Auxilio Onorio Mauris, Bon Reveil Isezerano, Mukunzi Eddy Fred, John Falestine John, with their instructor Dr. Katherine L. Hall who volunteer teaches academic writing and public speaking for students in the Elimisha Kakuma Cohort in Kenya.
In this paper I analyze Ambroise Vollard’s (1866-1939), Recollections of an Art Dealer (1936 in English) who championed Cézanne, Van Gogh and other avantgarde artists. I examine the anecdote’s interruption of autobiographical narrative allowing Vollard to recreate and critique an array of artworld figures and demonstrate the importance of dealers when a global art market was emerging and dealers were becoming dominant forces in the artworld. The anecdote in autobiography has been understudied; considered lightweight, merely entertaining, it was also a counterhistory for New Historicists and a widespread disruptive device in artists’ and dealers’ autobiographies from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, unlike autobiographical narratives of scientists and philosophers who did not deploy anecdotes. Among anecdotal devices are recreated conversations, making autobiographers into characters in their own stories. Anecdotes, the intrusion of the real, contributed to worlding, the creation of the intersubjectivity of the author’s past world. Finally, dealers’ autobiographies have unique temporalities: writing in the present about the past like all autobiographers, in their past they anticipated the future, supporting avantgarde artists at great financial risks. These intertwined temporalities are underscored by anecdotage’s free associations, interruptions, and citations of names of celebrities and social circles.
When Zachary Leader’s book was announced, I thought hard about its precedents: books about books—not literary criticism but accounts of the gritty, human production of really famous tomes. A niche genre. But then Boswell’s Life of Johnson came to mind and a quick Google search revealed Richard B. Sher’s 2023 study of precisely that: Making Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I for one would love to read it.
This paper examines the intellectual and literary work of Wang Zhenyi (1768–1797)—mathematician, astronomer, and poet of the Qing dynasty—within the broader landscape of premodern Chinese women’s scholarship. Although Wang Zhenyi is occasionally referenced in popular and reference accounts, sustained engagement with her writings remains limited. Situating her work within the rich intellectual cultures of late imperial China, the paper reads Wang Zhenyi’s travel poetry as a form of automathography, understood here as a mode of life writing in which mathematical reasoning, poetic form, and embodied experience are co-constituted. Drawing on narrative rhythmanalysis, the paper advances a life writing approach attentive to the temporal, affective, and kinetic rhythms through which thinking unfolds and selves are formed. Movement across landscapes, pauses, repetitions, and returns are analysed as epistemic gestures that bind observation, calculation, and self-formation. By tracing these automathographical rhythms across Wang Zhenyi’s poetic itineraries, the paper intervenes in life writing scholarship by extending automathography beyond retrospective autobiographical narratives and demonstrating how mathematical lives can be written across genres, through poetic and paratextual forms. In doing so, it offers a conceptual framework for reading intellectual self-formation as a rhythmic, distributed, and relational process.
This article compares German, English, and Swedish versions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century religious memoirs. We study four Moravian memoirs with two key dimensions in view: firstly, the tension between individuality and community, and secondly, the effects of global interconnectedness. By analysing how these traits were negotiated when the memoirs were translated, we demonstrate how gender, class, and colonial relationships affected autobiographical writing around the turn of the nineteenth century. We identify an inherent tension in the Moravian memoirs between hierarchy and egalitarianism. European ambitions for world dominance were growing, and in their missions abroad, the Moravians had to fit their religious agenda into colonial frameworks. But regional inequalities within Europe also put their mark on the memoirs. Theologically, the Moravians regarded the world as divided into core settlements, diaspora, and missionary areas. The division mirrored a general pattern of dependence on German culture in the Nordics. The negotiation of meaning playing out when texts were transferred between languages illustrates the secondary status of Swedish Moravians compared to the German core, as well as European colonial notions of non-European people. Also, women and women’s agency were toned down or removed entirely in the process of editing and translation.
Grant Rodwell’s memoir charts his journey from an impoverished childhood in the Oberon timber region of New South Wales, Australia to a distinguished career as teacher, principal, and multiple-doctorate scholar. What emerges is not simply a personal story but a rich contribution to life-writing scholarship, offering an intimate view into a working-class, rural childhood, which included institutionalised prejudice, and the enduring psychological consequences of adolescent trauma. It is equally a portrait of Australian educational history during a period of profound structural and cultural transformation. The book is well placed in the prolific emerging literature on the topic of biographical approaches in education, which utilizes life stories and individual histories to understand the link between learning and identity and their combined societal impact.
This recently published Dutch book is meant to reassess the ‘Vietnamese struggle for independence and the West,’ in the words of its subtitle. As such, the quote from journalist Neil Sheehan with which Rimko van der Maar precedes his work can be seen as a statement of intent: ‘There are some events that can be understood only with the perspective of time. The war in Vietnam is one’. Exactly what the book hopes to understand better about, as Van der Maar readily admits, a war that is one of ‘the most researched and described military conflict[s] of the Twentieth Century,’ is then formulated clearly in the introduction, where the author writes that he wants to ‘present the war from a Vietnamese perspective’. Not, to be clear, how the war was experienced by the Vietnamese, but rather how Vietnamese individuals and institutions sought to influence Western decision-making and public opinion. As such, this is very much a book on the ‘force and meaning of information, propaganda and diplomacy’.
Our globalized world is marked by transience and displacement. Narratives of colonization, war, and migration collide and mingle as individuals and communities are uprooted and ties with treasured people and places are severed. I inhabit one such narrative: a migrant navigating the interplay of belonging and unbelonging, and the complexities of cultural negotiation in a land colonized by my ancestors. While this article stands independently, it is informed by my doctoral research which engaged with the Māori concepts of tūrangawaewae [a place to stand] and whakapapa [genealogy] and my ongoing autoethnographic inquiry into immigrant identity, place, and postcolonial consciousness. The poems embedded throughout the text serve not only as accessible data but also as a structuring device — offering insight into the affective dimensions of migration and the impact of disrupted identity on self and place. The article contributes to the field of life writing by foregrounding creative expression as a valid and powerful mode of scholarly reflection, and by inviting readers into a storied exploration of how interrogating and writing about my past and my migration experience has profoundly shaped my self-concept and authorial voice. Ultimately, I discovered that writing itself can become a metaphorical tūrangawaewae: a place of safety, belonging, and return. Writing gives me a place to stand — but not stand still.
In Art School Prostitute, Dylan Jonas Stone describes deceiving the authorities in order to purchase an authentic police uniform to wear working as an escort. As a young boy, art making came easily to Dylan, sexualised at the age of 12 by an older man; incorporating the confusing combination of sex, dreams and drawing to create his feature film The Gardener’s Theatre, has been enlightening — and cinematic.
This cluster emerged from a two-day international workshop and conference, “Life Narrative and the Digital 2023”, which took place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in September 2023, and which was aimed at stimulating a conversation on the ‘possibilities, uses, and challenges of digital methods and technologies for auto/biographical research and practice.’ The contributions assembled in this cluster continue, and in many ways intensify, such an inter- and multi-disciplinary exchange between life-writing scholarship and digitally-oriented research. Taken together, they offer a panoramic vision of the diverse, and often highly innovative, scholarly work that is situated at the crossroads of auto/biography studies and digital technologies. They highlight the rich spectrum of source types, (cultural, historical, and geographical) contexts, methodological approaches, and themes that characterise this field of investigation, from (co-)constructing and (re-)presenting life narratives via social media and computer games to applying digital tools and methods that aid the study of lives and/or life writing. The cluster makes a timely contribution to an increasingly vibrant area of research that bridges traditional and digital humanities.
In 2012, Anna Anthropy released her computer game Dys4ia about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy. Described explicitly by her as an autobiographical game, Dys4ia inevitably invites comparison with the genres of autobiography, computer game, and digital life narrative. However, it appears to be at odds with all these categories. Within the framework of automediality, introduced by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser in 2008, this paper seeks to explore these discrepancies. First, it will analyse how Dys4ia relates to notions of autobiography and common types of game. Second, Dys4ia will be compared with weblogs, a prevalent form of digital life narratives. Third, by looking into the discourses surrounding the game, the paper aims to explain why Dys4ia was designed in this manner and to identify the discursive limits of this design. Thus, the article makes an important contribution to current research on computer games as media of life narration and self-expression.
This contribution investigates the online identity construction of the Romanian transgender vlogger Daria Jane, using as subjects of analysis her YouTube digital diary as well as videos published on the YouTube channel of a famous Romanian TV presenter who invited Daria to tell her transitioning story. Specifically, we will analyse viewers’ reactions in the comments sections of two videos, exploring the interplay between biography and autobiography within the digital space in the process. Using an interdisciplinary methodological framework that integrates online discourse analysis, identity studies, (micro)celebrity studies, and (auto)biography research, the paper addresses the ways in which Netizens co-construct Daria Jane’s life story on social media. Our methodology consists of examining a corpus of comments, identifying keywords, and creating categories (negative stancetaking and positive stancetaking) that reflect the attitudes and positions of Romanian users towards transgender identities. The study contributes to the scholarly discourse on online (self-)presentation by offering an analysis of YouTube comments and a visualisation of the data derived from these comments via the categories created. Furthermore, by exploring the dynamic relationships between Daria Jane, the TV host, and Romanian YouTube users, the article sheds light on the Romanian public perception regarding (trans)gender identities.
This conversation, which originally formed part of the two-day workshop-and-conference “Life Narrative and the Digital 2023” at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, brings together historians, literary and auto/biography scholars, and digital humanists to address the intersections of life-narrative scholarship and digital humanities. They offer different disciplinary perspectives on the possibilities and challenges posed by the increasing prevalence of digital tools and methods in auto/biographical research and practice and jointly explore the following questions: How will digital technologies and methods shape the future of auto/biography studies as a field? How can theoretical concepts from traditional life-narrative research enrich the field of digital humanities? How can the divide between traditional and digital humanities be overcome? Pointing out opportunities as well as problem areas, the exchange opens up new pathways towards a fruitful, critical, and, ultimately, mutually enriching disciplinary dialogue between life-narrative research ad digital humanities.
This contribution explores how the work carried out by the DARIAH-IT research team at the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI-CNR), supports biographical research on historical figures by developing an interoperable digital ecosystem for humanities and cultural heritage research. In this context, the RESTORE project was created with the aim of supporting biographical as well as philological and linguistic research on Francesco di Marco Datini, a merchant from Prato (Italy), who established a successful commercial network across Europe during the fourteenth century. RESTORE has gathered several datasets from multiple sources, including letters and other auto/biographical documents (both images and transcriptions), archival and accounting records, catalogs, and digital representations of artworks commissioned or owned by Datini and his family. Subsequently, a platform has been set up that brings together digital resources from several cultural institutions, allowing researchers to track relationships and connections among the data gathered from these materials in a single integrated semantic knowledge base aggregating Linked Open Data. This enables researchers to take a broad prosopographic approach, while also facilitating an in-depth exploration of specific aspects, such as welfare and religion. The platform also enables users to study the everyday life of historical figures by analyzing, for instance, the correspondence between Francesco Datini and his wife, Margherita, and other members of the family or collaborators. The project provides access to several resource types, including images and transcriptions, which offer different levels of detail of information. Additionally, the RESTORE research team has addressed the challenges faced by cultural institutions in managing the data lifecycle of digital resources, aiming to build a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) knowledge base enriched with scholarly information. This approach enhances research opportunities and enables integrated storytelling across diverse data collections. The models and solutions developed during this process are designed to be replicable by other institutions, ensuring the project’s long-term sustainability.
‘The Fence’ weaves a critical reading of the author’s unusual first day in the UK in 1987 with a reflection on borders and discrimination applied to both humans and birds. The contingency and instability of borders create a relative and precarious status when it comes to human and nonhuman animals; this shifting position is subject to socio-economics, history, legislation and the politics of representation that contribute to the production of othering. Alongside societal contingencies, this work emphasises the role of individual agency which can affect and override the outcomes predicated by these structural limitations.
This paper is the first examination of its kind of the Russian-language autofiction tradition, which emerged and developed in the context of recent socio-political upheavals. There is currently no single and universal understanding of what ‘autofiction’ is, and each national literary tradition implies its own nuances. In Russian literature, autofiction also has its own specific agenda and modulations, which derive exclusively from practice rather than theory (as was the case, say, with French literature). Initially facing harsh scepticism, Russian autofiction has gradually become a significant literary genre, largely preoccupied with the personal and collective traumas of the post-Soviet era. The paper traces the genre’s peculiarities and evolution, highlighting its roots in Soviet ‘camp prose’ and émigré memoirs. The first part of the paper provides a comprehensive overview of how autofiction has emerged and gained prominence in recent Russian literature. It explores the genre’s thematic preoccupations and its interaction with broader literary traditions, including its adaptation and transformation of Western autofictional texts. The second part employs theories of cultural traumas and cultural memory to analyse how Russian-language autofiction represents and refracts the traumatic experiences of its authors, offering new perspectives on collective memory and identity. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates how Russian autofiction affects the ‘transpersonal dimension’ through exploration of distorted family memories as well as dealing with the intergenerational and intertextual transmission of traumatic experience.
