On Life-Writing

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-870406-5
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 330 Seiten, Format (B × H): 142 mm x 218 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

Chapter 12 of this publication is open access, available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence, offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

'Life-writing' is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). On
Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to something of the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of 'life,' 'self' and 'story' which help to explain these changing fortunes and features, recent
attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, life-writing and psychoanalysis, life-writing and philosophy. The essays mostly focus on individual instances rather than fields, whether historical, theoretical or generic. Generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the 'life-changing encounter,' a
frequent trope in literary life-writing, is pondered by Hermione Lee through an account of a much-storied first meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the 'cradle to grave' life-narrative, as well as the potential
distortions it breeds, by focusing on Shakespeare biography, in particular attempts to explain Shakespeare's so-called 'lost years'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leader, Zachary

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Zachary Leader grew up in California but has lived in Britain for over forty years. He was educated at Northwestern University, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard. In addition to teaching at Roehampton, he has taught at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He is the author of Reading Blake's Songs, Writer's Block, Revision and Romantic Authorship, and The Life of Kingsley Amis, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in
Biography. The first volume of his two-volume biography of Saul Bellow will be published this May. He has edited three volumes for OUP: On Modern British Fiction, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (with Michael O'Neill) and The Movement Reconsidered. Leader is also general editor of the Oxford History of Life-Writing, a projected
seven-volume series. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.