1st Edition
Transculturing Auto/Biography Forms of Life Writing
Rosalia Baena’s theoretically challenging, analytical volume of essays, explores the diversity of shapes that transcultural life writing takes, demonstrating how it has become one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms of self-inscription and self-representation.
Expanding much of the contemporary criticism on life writing, which tends to centre on content, the essays highlight that reading contemporary forms of life writing from a literary perspective is a rich field of critical intervention that has been overlooked because of recent cultural studies’ concerns with material issues. To read life writing as primarily cultural texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities.
This book was previously published as a special issue of Prose Studies.
Introduction: Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing Rosalia Baena. Shifting Forms of Sovereignty: Immigrant Parents and Ethnic Autobiographers William Boelhower. The Hungry Self: The Politics of Food in Italian American Women’s Autobiographies Alison D. Goeller. Painted Selves: Autography through Art of South Asian American Women Gita Rajan. A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis' Rocío G. Davis. Facts of the Mind made Manifest in a Fiction of Matter: Theory and Practice of Life Writing in Maya Deren’s Early Films Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. Autobiographical Story Cycles as a Vehicle for Enlightenment: Fredelle Bruser Maynard's Raisins and Almonds and The Tree of Life Danielle Schaub. In Praise of Art and Literature: Intertextuality, Translations and Migrations of Knowledge in Anna Jameson’s Travel Writings Rita Monticelli. Paradigms of Canadian Literary Biography: Who Will Write Our History? Ana Beatriz Delgado
Biography
Rosalia Baena
'Graduate students in particular will identify this book as a historical marker in the evolution of life writing theory' - Marlene Kadar, Biography
