Cora Kaplan and Jenny Bourne Taylor (guest editors)
Life writing now holds a ubiquitous place in contemporary culture rivalling,
overlapping and problematising distinctions between the factual records
of life history and its fictional counterparts. This special issue responds
to the rise and rise of biography, autobiography and memoir in recent decades,
a popular explosion which has extended across every segment of a thriving
market. Five broad categories frame the issue: the process of recalling
and writing the past; the relationship between autobiography and fiction,
the ways in which representation negotiates trauma, how to write the autobiography
of political movements, and finally the way in which biography as a non
theoretical form sets a paradigm for understanding of its own.
Contributors: Jérôme Hansen, Margaretta Jolly, Esther Leslie, Alison Light, Roger Luckhurst, Jane Mansfield, Ray Monk, Griselda Pollock, Claudine Raynaud, Martin Ryle, Lynne Segal, Alan Sinfield, Carolyn Steedman, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Gillian Swanson, Geoffrey Wall
Cover
Image: Charlotte Salomon Life? or Theatre?, 1941-42, Jewish Historical
Museum, Amsterdam. JHM 4288. Reproduced Courtesy of the Charlotte Salomon
Foundation, Amsterdam.
Cora Kaplan and Jenny Bourne Taylor Editorial
Carolyn Steedman On Not Writing Biography
Margaretta Jolly On Burning, Saving and Stealing Letters
Martin Ryle John Mcgahern: Memory, Autobiography, Fiction, History
Claudine Raynaud ‘Flesh and Blood’: Autobiographical ‘Material’
between Fiction and Non-fiction
Griselda Pollock The missing photograph: Charlotte Salomon Life?
Or Theatre? as the Encounter with Maternal Loss
Lyndsey Stonebridge Hannah Arendt’s Testimony: Judging
in a Lawless World
Roger Luckhurst Reflections
on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
Geoffrey Wall Talk About the Party: Conversations with the SWP
Alan Sinfield Queerstories in Brighton
Lynne Segal Who do you think you are? Feminist Memoir Writing
Ray Monk Biography and Theory Reconsidered: Second Wittgensteinian
Thoughts
Gillian Swanson The Archive and the Detail
Esther Leslie Art’s Labour
BOOKNOTES
Jane Mansfield, Jérôme Hansen
Note to overseas subscribers: you can use your local credit card to pay in sterling, money will be paid in sterling and deducted from your account in local currency
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