Writing autobiography is a risky business. What is shameful can be inadvertently rather than deliberately revealed. Yet reading autobiography can also be risky, as it may lead to the confrontation of shame in ourselves. Perhaps it is this element of risk, together with the magnetism of another person's confession of shameful experience, that make us such avid readers of autobiography. Rosamund Dalziell proposes that shame is the driving force in many Australian autobiographies. Indeed, she suggests that the representation of shame is fundamental to the autobiographical process. Shame seeks concealment-and this, she argues, explains both why this fascinating link has not before been explored and why, when it is pointed out, we immediately know it to be authentic. Shameful Autobiographies looks at pervasive patterns of shame in the autobiographies of such leading Australian writers as Germaine Greer, Sally Morgan, Bernard Smith, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Morris Lurie, Ruby Langford Ginibi and Robert Dessaix. In so doing it establishes the centrality of shame to problems of Australian identity and to current political debate-for instance, it is shame that fuels angry repudiations of the so-called 'black armband' view of history. The calm clarity of Rosamund Dalziell's writing strengthens her powerful insights and arguments, the most potent of which is that autobiographical confrontion with shame can heal deep wounds, both for writers and for readers. This mature and innovative book will enrich the experience of all readers of autobiography.

Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a surge in the publication and popularity of autobiographical writings about childhood. Linking literary and cultural studies, Contesting Childhood draws on a varied selection of works from a diverse range of authorsùfrom first-time to experienced writers. Kate Douglas explores Australian accounts of the Stolen Generation, contemporary American and British narratives of abuse, the bestselling memoirs of Andrea Ashworth, Augusten Burroughs, Robert Drewe, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, and Lorna Sage, among many others. Drawing on trauma and memory studies and theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials, and tribulations that have shaped this genre. Douglas examines the content of the narratives and the limits of their representations, as well as some of the ways in which autobiographies of youth have become politically important and influential. This study enables readers to discover how stories configure childhood within cultural memory and the public sphere.

The “Self” Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, assembles articles on women’s life-writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world. It is comprised of nine chapters that discuss female writers from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to French writers. The idea of the self is currently attracting widespread interest in academia, most notably in the arts and humanities. The development of postmodernism supposes a fragmented “subject” formed from the network of available discourses, rather than a stable and coherent self. Jacques Derrida, for example, wrote that there is no longer any such things as a “full subject,” and Julia Kristeva now insists that the individual is a “subject in process.” The growing importance of psychoanalytic theory, particular in French studies, has also impacted upon this development. The basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that the individual is formed of a duality: the conscious and unconscious parts of the self which prevent the individual from ever fully knowing her/himself, and which thus insists upon a plural, incomplete self. Developments in the field of postcolonial studies have also made us aware of different ways of approaching the self in different parts of the world, and eroded the idea of a stable, conscious and complete self. As scholars examine these new ways of approaching the self, autobiography has been the subject of renewed interest. Several academic books have appeared in recent years that study the ways in which autobiographers represent the self as incomplete, evolving and elusive. In particular, a number of books have appeared on the subject of women’s autobiography and female subjectivity, such as works by Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson and Nancy Miller, and several volumes interrogate postcolonial women’s autobiography, such as texts by Françoise Lionnet, Gayatri Spivak, Carole Boyce Davies and Chandra Mohanty. Our volume unites these strands of criticism, by examining ways that female autobiographies write the self as a fragmented, plural construct across the Francophone world. This will be the first book-length study of this important development. This volume will be of interest primarily to students and scholars working in the areas of life-writing, French and Francophone studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. The volume contributes to multiple areas that are currently garnering substantial interest in academe: postcolonial studies, Francophone studies, gender studies and women’s writing. By comparing works from across the Francophone world, our volume takes a global approach to the genre of autobiography and its inflections by women writers. The “Self” That is Not One in Women’s Autobiography in French therefore represents a timely intervention in several interlinking academic fields and will thus garner substantial interest.

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.

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of “academic memoir.” This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker’s ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past.

This book argues that the writing of autobiography raises crucial issues of conscience as an author tries to know, assess, and represent character. Individual chapters explore such issues as the nature of truthfulness, characterization, the virtues, shame, and the religious dimensions of conscience.

The Son’s Book of the Father, as Richard Freadman termed it, is a rich field of relational autobiography, offering a unique set of tensions and insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and the ethics of representing another’s life in writing one’s own. This study of modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on fathers places an emerging sub-genre within its literary ancestry and its contemporary milieu. Providing compelling readings of Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’, Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’ and many others, this is the first study of its kind within Australian literature.