Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith and Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Life Writing in the Long Run gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century. It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality. Available in print, eBook, and open access versions, this collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.

About the Author :
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson co-authored Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001; expanded edition, 2010) and co-edited five collections: Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819-1919 (2006); Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998); Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996); and De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (1992). They have published influential essays on life writing, most recently on testimony and on online life narrative. Sidonie Smith is Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is a past president of the Modern Language Association of America (2010). Her books include Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (2015); Moving Lives: Women's Twentieth- Century Travel Narratives (2001); Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993); A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (1987); and, with Kay Schaffer, Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004). Julia Watson is Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, a former Associate Dean, and a Core Faculty member of Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. Her recent essays are on visual diary, graphic memoir, and voice in memoir.

Review :
Both as remarkable individuals, and as the most high-powered and influential team in life writing, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been defining and moving the field forward for decades. If their landmark volume Reading Autobiography is the owner's manual for autobiography studies, Life Writing in the Long Run serves the same function for their remarkable achievements as theorists, critics, and editors. An absolutely indispensable collection for present and future scholars, and a monument to the most consistently productive, innovative, and generous scholars I know. -Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research; Co-Editor, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Many of these essays have entered the lexicon of criticism in the field of life narrative: the rumpled bed of autobiography, the metrics of authenticity. Smith and Watson are an assemblage, a generative force that has always been slightly ahead of the curve: setting the pace, with a practical bent for toolkits and maps, a prescient sense of getting a life and de/colonizing the subject and, in the long run, an enduring passion for the pleasures of life narrative. -Gillian Whitlock, Professor, University of Queensland