The Protean Forms of Life Writing

Stimulated by Paul John Eakin’s most recent reflections on autobiographical studies and by Richard Holmes’s state of the art on biographical studies, the contributors to this collection of essays present some significant case studies of auto/biography and related subgenres: spiritual autobiography, ‘heterobiography’, Kunstlerautobiographie, biography and memoir, fictional biography and blog/diary – all of them seen in their time and place specificity, and written by authors belonging to the English and American canon (Wordsworth, De Quincey, Ruskin, Yeats, Orwell, Lodge, Barnes, Toibin... Henry James and Nabokov) as well as to an Anglophone colonial and postcolonial canon still in progress (Hal Porter, Patrick White, Keri Hulme, V. S. Naipaul).