The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing.
Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections—Foundations, Transformations, and Futures—each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, Sidonie Smith
General Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky
Part 1: Foundations
Foundations Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky
1. Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction, James Olney
2. Conception and Origin of Autobiography, Georg Misch
3. Conditions and Limits of Autobiography, Georges Gusdorf
4. Autobiography as De-facement, Paul de Man
5. The Autobiographical Pact, Philippe Lejeune
6. Design and Lie in Modern American Autobiography, Timothy Dow Adams
7. Is There a Canon of Autobiography?, Eugene Stelzig
8. Reflections of a Reluctant Anthologist, Arnold Krupat
9. Forgotten Voices of Afro-American Autobiography, 1865–1930, William L. Andrews
10. Between Lines: Constructing the Political Self, Magdalena Maíz Peña and Luis H. Peña
11. The Impact of Critical Theory on the Study of Autobiography: Marginality, Gender, and Autobiographical Practice, Sidonie Smith
12. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative, Marlene Kadar
13. Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing, G. Thomas Couser
14. Biography and Autobiography: Intermixing the Genres, Lois W. Banner
15. Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree, Julia Watson
Part 2: Transformations
Transformations Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky
16. Kathie Lee Gifford and the Commodification of Autobiography, Martin Danahay
17. Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs, Susannah B. Mintz
18. Memorializing Memory: Marlon Riggs and Life Writing in Tongues Untied and Black Is Black Ain’t, Harvey Young
19. Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography, Jack/Judith Halberstam
20. Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity, Leigh Gilmore
21. Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self, Arturo Arias
22. Recasting Indigenous Lives along the Lines of Western Desire: Editing, Autobiography, and the Colonizing Project, Alison Ravenscroft
23. Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity, Helen M. Buss
24. Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography, Alfred Hornung
25. The Incomplete Return, Isabelle de Courtivron
26. Letters as/not a Genre, Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley
27. Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity, Julie Rak
28. Autographics: The Seeing "I" of the Comics, Gillian Whitlock
29. What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?, Paul John Eakin
30. Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism, Charles Altieri
Part 3: Futures
Futures Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky
31. Family Matters, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
32. Living Autoethnography: Connecting Life and Research – Faith Wambura Ngunjiri, Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez, and Heewon Chang
33. Cultural Ecology, Literature, and Life Writing, Hubert Zapf
34. His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman, Cynthia Huff and Joel Haefner
35. Engendering an Alternative Approach to Otherness in African Women’s Autobiography, Folasade Hunsu
36. Subjects in the Margins, Leonor Arfuch
37. Memoirs of Return: Saidiya Hartman, Eva Hoffman, and Daniel Mendelsohn in Conversation with Nancy K. Miller, Nancy K. Miller
38. The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch
39. Comics Form and Narrating Lives, Hillary Chute
40. Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online, Paul Longley Arthur
41. Celebrity Bio Blogs: Hagiography, Pathography, and Perez Hilton, Elizabeth Podnieks
42. Cyberrace, Lisa Nakamura
43. Faith, Doubt, and Textual Identity, Susanna Egan
44. Making the Case for Self-narration Against Autofiction, Arnaud Schmitt
45. Genetic Studies of Life Writing, Philippe Lejeune
About the Author :
Ricia Anne Chansky is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is the co-editor of the scholarly journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and editor of the forthcoming volumes Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives and Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. She also founded the International Auto/Biography Association – Chapter of the Americas.
Emily Hipchen is Professor of Writing at the University of West Georgia, USA. She is co-editor of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and co-editor of the volume Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez.
Review :
"The Reader’s credentials are impeccable, with a foreword by Sidonie Smith, contributions from key figures in the field such as James Olney, and the inclusion of other seminal work including Paul de Man’s "Autobiography as De-Facement." This is, then, a diverse and far-reaching approach to the topic: comics crop up in more than one chapter, and the book is able to boast a wide range of methodologies and themes, including interdisciplinarity, disability, agency, celebrity, and even genealogical approaches and DNA testing. This is a highly enjoyable and engaging study which takes in a variety of contrasting texts." - Forum on Modern Language Studies
"The Routledge Auto/biography Studies Reader is timely, dense and provocative, and a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour." - Trev Lynn Broughton, Life Writing
"Chansky and Hipchen offer carefully edited and organized selected essays tracing key debates in a one-stop volume that marks the multidisciplinary, multimediated direction of the field." - Margaretta Jolly, Oxford Bibliography of Biography and Autobiography
