Life Writing and Space

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4724-2794-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 244 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 620 g

How does our ability, desire or failure to locate ourselves within space, and with respect to certain places, effect the construction and narration of our identities? Approaching recordings and interpretations of selves, memories and experiences through the lens of theories of space and place, this book brings the recent spatial turn in the Humanities to bear upon the work of life writing. It shows how concepts of subjectivity draw on spatial ideas and metaphors, and how the grounding and uprooting of the self is understood in terms of place. The different chapters investigate ways in which selves are reimagined through relocation and the traversing of spaces and texts. Many are concerned with the politics of space: how racial, social and sexual topographies are navigated in life writing. Some examine how focusing on space, rather than time, impacts upon auto/biographical form. The book blends sustained theoretical reflections with textual analyses and also includes experimental contributions that explore independencies between spaces and selves by combining criticism with autobiography. Together, they testify that life writing can hardly be thought of without its connection to space.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kilian, Eveline

Wolf, Hope

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

The Spatial Dimensions of Life Writing

(Eveline Kilian and Hope Wolf)

PART I: RELOCATING AND REIMAGINING THE SELF

1. Multiple Occupancy: Residency and Retrospection in Trollope’s Orley Farm and An Autobiography

(Matthew Ingleby)

2. Lost Cities and Found Lives: The ‘Geographical Emotions’ of Bryher and Walter Benjamin

(Andrew Thacker)

3. Hilary Mantel and the Space of Life Writing

(Neil Vickers)

PART II: TRAVERSING SPACES AND TEXTS

4. Literary Configurations of the Peripatetic

(Helga Schwalm)

5. ‘The mystery-magic of foreignness’: Mr Isherwood Changes Places

(Eveline Kilian)

6. Critical Topographies in Depression Era Lives

(Martin Klepper and Alexandra Wagner)

PART III: CONTESTED SPACES, PRECARIOUS LIVES

7. Postcolonial Literary Cartography: Writing the Self in Contemporary Algeria

(Elizabeth H. Jones)

8. Inhabiting the In-Between: (Mis)placing Identity in Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks

(Kathrin Tordasi)

9. Isaac Rosenberg’s Life in Letters: Between the ‘coil of circumstance’ and a ‘place for poetry’

(Anne-Julia Schoen)

PART IV: SPACE AND THE FORM OF LIFE WRITING

10. Spaces of Intervention: Hélène Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint

(Frédéric Regard)

11. Strandlines: Eccentric Stories, Thoroughfare Poetics and the Future of the Archive

(Hope Wolf)

12. The Columbus of the Near-at-Hand: The Author as Traveller through the Everyday

(James Attlee)

13. There’s No Space Like Home

(Clare Brant)

Über Autor(innen)

Eveline Kilian is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Hope Wolf is Lecturer in British Modernist Literature at the University of Sussex, UK.