'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'.

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

On Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing. The collection brings together eminent scholars and writers to reflect on specific examples of life-writing to reflect broader themes within the genre.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I stumbled upon life writing at age?twenty-nine. I was?at?that moment in?a divorce?when you know its over?and its time to move on. I?realized how little?I?understood my life and that?I had no real sense of?how to make a life.?I wanted a life.?I wanted?a certain kind of?satisfaction?from life?that I knew existed; yet here I was, very clear that?this?marriage?wasnt going to work out?and faced with raising?a?lovely?child?alone?as I?made?my way?toward this certain something I couldnt even name. I moved in with my best friends parents, who were very kind to me. To?try to get a handle on things, I?secluded?myself?in their?basement for many evenings to dissect?my?life story.?It was just instinct.?Starting with?my?earliest memory, I?started the?walk?forward, sifting carefully through each?experience I could?recall. I would approach?certain memories?in the writing, and my body would tighten.?At first I just kept going, but those particular memories called me back. So I went back, slowed down, and?sifted more carefullylooking at the?scene, the?circumstances, the?people involved, and?at?myself, my emotions, my perceptions, and my?fears. At the end?of this?rather intense?process,?there was no doubt that something?in me?had shifted. I?felt?a new?sense of self-possession. I felt aware of myself in a way I wasnt before.?I can see this same new presence and power arise in the faces of?others as they complete the life-writing process. The Life Writing Workbook guides you step-by-step through eight sessions of deeply engaging, private, and transformative writing through your life story.?

This book examines the relationship between life writing and celebrity in English-language and comparative literary and cultural contexts, focusing on historical as well as contemporary auto/biographical subjects. With contributions on the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington, Charles Dickens, Mary Pickford, Sergei Eisenstein, W.H. Auden, Marilyn Monroe, and Michael Jackson, amongst others, the book encompasses a wide range of disciplines and approaches. It explores the representation of famous lives in genres as varied as TV documentary, biopic, biofiction, journalism, (authorized) biography, and painting. The contributors address broad themes including authenticity, self-fashioning, identity politics, and ethics; and reflect on the ways in which these affect the reading and writing of celebrity lives. This volume is the first to bring together life writing and celebrity studies—two vibrant and innovative areas of research which are closely connected through their shared concerns with authenticity and intimacy, public and private selves, myth-making and revelation. As such it will be of interest to a wide range of scholars from across the humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

With recent advances in digital technology, a number of exciting and innovative approaches to writing lives have emerged, from graphic memoirs to blogs and other visual-verbal-virtual texts. This edited collection is a timely study of new approaches to writing lives, including literary docu-memoir, autobiographical cartography, social media life writing and autobiographical writing for children. Combining literary theory with insightful critical approaches, each essay offers a serious study of innovative forms of life writing, with a view to reflecting on best practice and offering the reader practical guidance on methods and techniques. Offering a range of practical exercises and an insight into cutting-edge literary methodologies, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking companion for students of literature and creative writing studying courses on life writing, memoir or creative non-fiction.

Research Methods in Health Humanities surveys the diverse and unique research methods used by scholars in the growing, transdisciplinary field of health humanities. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates, but rich enough to engage more seasoned students and scholars, this volume is an essential teaching and reference tool for health humanities teachers and scholars. Health humanities is a field committed to social justice and to applying expertise to real world concerns, creating research that translates to participants and communities in meaningful and useful ways. The chapters in this field-defining volume reflect these values by examining the human aspects of health and health care that are critical, reflective, textual, contextual, qualitative, and quantitative. Divided into four sections, the volume demonstrates how to conduct research on texts, contexts, people, and programs. Readers will find research methods from traditional disciplines adapted to health humanities work, such as close reading of diverse texts, archival research, ethnography, interviews, and surveys. The book also features transdisciplinary methods unique to the health humanities, such as health and social justice studies, digital health humanities, and community dialogues. Each chapter provides learning objectives, step-by-step instructions, resources, and exercises, with illustrations of the method provided by the authors' own research. An invaluable tool in learning, curricular development, and research design, this volume provides a grounding in the traditions of the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences for students considering health care careers, but also provides useful tools of inquiry for everyone, as we are all future patients and future caregivers of a loved one.

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times.

Surveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee's career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee's writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life that involves an entanglement of politics and ethics, which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout his engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Coetzee's politics of life yield a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century; a powerful commentary on our interrelatedness that emphasises finitude and contingency as fundamental to the way we live together.