A History of English Autobiography

A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiography. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle, Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive, single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: the range, limits and potentials of the form Adam Smyth; 2. Medieval life-writing: types, encomia, exemplars, patterns Barry Windeatt; 3. Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate David Matthew; 4. The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography Molly Murray; 5. Inscribing the early modern self: the materiality of autobiography Kathleen Lynch; 6. Writing and revolution: civil war lives Suzanne Trill; 7. Money, accounting and life-writing, 1600–1700: balancing a life Adam Smyth; 8. Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper Tessa Whitehouse; 9. 'Written by herself': British women's autobiography in the eighteenth century Robert Folkenflik; 10. The lives of things: objects, it-narratives and fictional autobiography, 1700–1800 Lynn Festa; 11. Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography John Richetti; 12. Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century David Vincent; 13. Romantic life-writing Duncan Wu; 14. Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography: Carlyle, Mill, Newman Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen; 15. Emerging selves: the autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Annie Wood Besant Carol Hanbery MacKay; 16. Victorian artists' autobiographies: transgression, res gestae and the collective life Julie Codell; 17. Victorian print culture: periodicals and serial lives, 1830–60 Stephen Colclough; 18. 'Fusions and interrelations': family members of Henry James, Edmund Gosse and others Max Saunders; 19. Queer lives: Wilde, Stein, Sackville-West, Woolf, Doolittle Georgia Johnston; 20. Anecdotal remembrance: forms of First and Second World War life-writing Hope Wolf; 21. Experiments in form: modernism and autobiography in Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce and Dorothy Richardson Laura Marcus; 22. Psychoanalysis and autobiography Maud Ellman; 23. Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s: Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Spender Michael O'Neill; 24. Documenting lives: mass observation, women's diaries and everyday modernity Nick Hubble; 25. Postcolonial autobiography in English: the example of Trinidad Bart Moore-Gilbert; 26. Around 2000: memoir as literature Joseph Brooker; 27. Illness narratives Neil Vickers; 28. Breaking the pact: contemporary autobiographical diversions Roger Luckhurst; 29. The machines that write us: social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse Andreas Kitzmann.

About the Author :
Adam Smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J. C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in English Literature and University Lecturer in the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010) and 'Profit and Delight': Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682, and coeditor, with Gill Partington, of Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary.

Review :
'Adam Smyth's revelatory history of the genre … told … in new ways, and with fresh examples …' Thomas Keyer, London Review of Books 'This impressive collection resembles the genre with which it is concerned in so far as it pulls in several directions at once. … like autobiography, the book is suggestive, variegated, provocative.' Trev Broughton, Life Writing 'Carefully argued, compelling, and ambitious, A History of English Autobiography extends the current revisionist approach to autobiography initiated by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Mary Poovey, Paul De Man, and Philippe Lejeune. Its interrogation of the genre and its rich range of rhetorical forms prove consistently illuminating. In sum, the collection advances the formal study of the self's written rendering.' Katherine Kickel, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats