Chapter 2 explores the 1814 collaboration between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and extends scholarly attention to their travel journals, before discussing Frankenstein. Using the couple’s shared journal as a way of marking their convergence and redefinition of themselves from a singular identity to a shared pluralism, the journal’s entries witness a shared understanding – a sympathetic concord – between the couple. This close examination of the collaborative process indicates a willingness to assimilate and accommodate the other’s sentiments and formal constructs. While the narratives of these entries show the completion of each other’s thoughts and a reliance upon readerly circulation, the entries’ form also gestures to their defined plural identity through a vocal blending. With its sustained focus on the sympathetic communities developed by the couple and increased literary production as a result of this lived communal experience, I suggest that the Shelley collaboration ultimately shapes the narrative form of Frankenstein. The novel’s layered narrative of sympathetic texts makes possible a view of the collaborative compilation of the novel as a means of social reform: a view of society that relies upon the affective bonds of sympathy with a community of people, whether imaginative or genuine.

Chapter 5 explores the lived experience of communal relations and the importance of joining art to literature by examining the poetry and verse dramas of Michael Field. This chapter looks specifically at the ways in which the couple reclassify and revitalize female tragic history by experimenting with the boundaries of literary form. As a case study that aligns with the late Victorian transition into Modernism, this chapter locates a shift in conceptions of liberal community development as Michael Field complicate critical dichotomies between Victorian and Decadent; Decadent and Modern. In so doing, I suggest that Michael Field carries traces of the liberal sympathetic experience witnessed in their life-writing into their amalgamation of specifically decadent characteristics in their poetry and verse drama. The shift toward Decadence that Michael Field marks in this project allows for a seamless move into Modernism.

This chapter examines Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998), written by famed Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs, and considers this text’s status within the field of Asian American literary studies. As an autobiography that details Boggs’s activist history, including the history of state neglect in her home base of Detroit, and as a text that decenters Boggs’s experience as a Chinese American woman, Living for Change opens uncommon ground for Asian American literary inquiry. Rather than opening up questions around racial authenticity, the governing framework for Asian American autobiographical criticism, Boggs’s autobiography instead demonstrates how ethnic American autobiography might respond to the death-dealing force of urban infrastructural abandonment. It thus showcases the pliability of a generic category that has often proved vexing for scholars of Asian American studies. Taking its cues from Boggs’s text, which prioritizes her relationship to place over and above her Chinese American identity, this chapter furthers a framework of place-consciousness, proposed by scholar Karin Aguilar San-Juan, that considers forms of belonging both alongside and in excess of race and ethnicity. In so doing, it demonstrates how Living for Change expands dominant understandings of ethnic American autobiography’s cultural and political imperatives.

Creative non-fiction, including modes of essay, letter and journal writing, has been an important genre in Caribbean writing. Caribbean literature has had a long history of creative/critical intersections, and many of the most significant creative figures have also been influential in setting critical agendas through these literary forms (Brathwaite, Brodber, Lamming, Walcott, Wynter). During the contemporary period, creative non-fiction has also functioned as a key site for writers to explore ideas about the changing Caribbean, in its political, social, artistic, and spiritual dimensions, and to constantly recontextualize the Caribbean’s place in the world. This essay addresses how selected Caribbean writers have participated in the genre of nonfiction from the 1970s to the present. The discussion explores the issues and problems of categories and classifications and offers close readings of non-fictional works by V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and Rachel Manley.

This chapter considers the forms and functions of feminist writings from life in the twenty-first century, illuminating a perceived shift in the conception of the personal-as-political. Part one addresses recent feminist memoirs which seek to memorialise a period and a collective experience, thereby doing history as autobiography (Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak (2002) and Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007)); it asks how and to what ends past feminisms are narrated and remembered in the present. Part two turns to the emergence of generically inventive and autofictional forms of life writing by women in recent years. Mixing essay, fiction, theory, and autobiography, texts such as Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) and Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (2000) displace the writing ‘I’ via the incorporation and assimilation of various other life stories. I assess the possibilities and limitations of this embrace of empathetic intersubjectivity as an ethical strategy of recent feminist life writing, considering how this reframesin perhaps problematically privatised waysearlier notions of solidarity and collectivity.

This chapter examines the memory of those who conformed and compromised – so-called ‘Nicodemites’ – in the English Reformation. It takes as its starting point and central case study Matthew Parker (1504-75), the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury, and his self-memorialisation in his memorial roll, a curious document which has often been described as autobiographical. The chapter considers the format, content and purpose of this unique manuscript, focusing particularly on the section dealing with Parker’s life during the reign of Mary I (1553-8) and the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England; a period in which Parker, unlike many other celebrated Protestants, was neither a martyr nor an exile, choosing instead the partial compromise of remaining in his newly hostile homeland. Both Parker himself and then his subsequent presented these years as either a period of inner spiritual constancy or as a time of suffering, a quasi-martyrdom. This, the chapter argues, reflects and illuminates a much larger process in which individual compromise was rewritten or forgotten in the creation of a larger, collective cultural memory of Protestant resistance and triumph.

In the aftermath of House Made of Dawn (1968) the assumption arose that it heralded a Native American Renaissance, the unprecedented literary flowering of fiction, poetry, life-writing, drama and discursive work. The roster typically included novels by Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welsh, Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, the poetry of Luci Tapahonso, Simon Ortiz and Linda Hogan, and the theatre of Hanay Geiogamah. In Native American Renaissance, not un-controversially, Kenneth Lincoln would argue that a presiding canon had emerged. Questions, however, arose as to how to situate these undoubtedly important figures within the larger continuum of Native authorship. What status was to hold for the vast legacies of oral tradition, tribal oratory, trickster story, chants of healing, even visual art? How best to address Canadian/First Nation publication, E. Pauline Johnson to Tom King? What of contemporaries like Sherman Alexie? This chapter looks both vertically and horizontally to position the Native American Renaissance.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.

In the introduction I define the term ‘new audacity’ as the recent refusal of shame, silence, and a boldness in tackling difficult topics in life-writing by feminists. I introduce the authors I will be studying, define feminism for the project, and discuss the history of experimental feminist life-writing and new audacity’s precurssors. I also show how new audacity writing is different to French autofiction, new narrative, and the new sincerity, and provide a chapter summary.

Using Frank O’Connor’s autobiography as an example, this essay assesses more generally the profile of Irish autobiography within the critical retrospectives of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in an Ireland deeply concerned with its own transition to independent adulthood. Autobiographies intentionally blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Semi-autobiographical accounts of a child’s development in a troubled state – a phrase which covers both individual and national conditions – predominated during this period. This essay considers the function of O’Connor’s first and most successful autobiography, An Only Child (1961), as a systematic and comprehensive assault on the nationalist, militarist and masculine regimes of power imposed on the protagonist during his childhood and adolescence. Generally, while O’Connor overtly links his protagonist’s awakening to the emergence of a masculine and hegemonic national self-determination, he also distances himself from this process by privileging the individual over the communal. This manifests itself in a number of revisionist depictions of the revolutionary period, in, for example, exposing the hypocrisy endemic to his fellow interned Republican prisoners in 1923, or his thematic evocation of the male body as a site of metaphoric significance for the broader concept of the Free State’s ‘body politic’.

This chapter explores some of the usages to which biography – and particularly literary biography – was put in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The analysis begins with Benedict Kiely’s Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton (1947), and subsequently traces the many engagements that were made by Norman A. Jeffares, Richard Ellmann and others with the titanic figures of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. It then discusses how the much less canonical ‘The Irish Writers Series’, published by Bucknell University, provided a much-utilised platform for students and critics of modern Irish writing, with biographies ranging in subject from James Clarence Mangan to Edna O’Brien. Reflecting on a number of biographies of Irish writers written in this period, it considers the impact of literary biography on the shaping of a twentieth-century narrative of modern Irish writing; in particular, its proximity to traditions of liberal humanism, and its attractiveness to an American academy. The chapter also discusses how, in the 1970s, increased levels of professionalisation and a growing sense of self-confidence in biographical writing coincided with a need for collective reflection and critical commentary.

Autobiography and life-writing have been popular genres and were frequently used by writers as a vehicle to create political impact. Building on the scholarship of Bart Moore-Gilbert and Javed Majeed, this chapter compares the political autobiographies of two well-known global public figures, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Whilst such works may not routinely be located as part of the trajectory of black and Asian British cultural production, both Gandhi and Nehru spent many formative years in Britain and both books were first published prior to Independence in 1947 when Nehru and Gandhi were British colonial citizens. Moreover, despite their respective political differences with the British as they fought for Independence, they often portrayed themselves as being both ‘of’ and ‘not of’ the place. The chapter also makes reference to autobiographical writings by other well-known colonial citizens of empire, including poet turned Gandhian activist, Sarojini Naidu, and Kenya’s and Ghana’s future prime ministers, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.

While in the 1980s and 1990s the capacious genre of life-writing provided an accessible frame to counter erasure for women writers, represent their lives, and articulate the complexity of their multiple subject positions, the chapter focuses on the ways in which black and Asian women writers such as Andrea Levy, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo have invented themselves through autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and memoirs. Charting life-writing’s flexible and subversive potential, the chapter examines three recurrent preoccupations: home and return; orphanhood, adoption, and foster care; and the often transatlantic and diasporic search for lost family histories. Enabling the reinvention of black and Asian female subjectivities and a range of perspectives from which to confront the silences of history, the chapter illuminates the ways in which the diverse possibilities of life-writing have empowered a number of writers to engage with, transcend, and counter such pressures, writing themselves into the narrative of British history and continuing to create new voices and contexts from which to reconfigure their lives.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.

Chapter 1, ‘Medieval Ovids’, opens the discussion with perhaps the most prolific and the most devious author of autofiction in ancient literature: the poet Ovid. Ovid had no surviving ancient tradition of Lives, but his texts themselves provided an ideal ground for the creation of biofictional narratives. Encoding within them a life-story that deliberately teeters between fiction and reality, Ovid’s texts invited a life-centred reception that illustrates some of the essential dynamics of biofictional reading. With no ancient Life available to them, medieval writers willingly took up Ovid’s implicit invitation to produce biofictional supplements to his texts, telling and retelling stories about the poet’s imaginary lives: from the accessus or ‘introduction’ that typically prefaced texts of ancient authors, often inscribed as a paratext to the poet’s works in the manuscripts themselves, to the thirteenth-century pseudepigraphal De vetula, a 2400-line poem presented as Ovid’s autobiography from exile discovered in the poet’s recently excavated tomb. Seemingly situated on the margins of medieval culture, these experiments in life-writing show that biofictional engagement with Ovid functioned as a dynamic and creative site of reading texts and writing Lives in the period, foregrounding the case for biofiction as a mode of textual engagement in reception.

Chapter 2 examines the staging of lives in early modern England, focusing on what is probably the most densely biofictional play of the period, Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). Poetaster is predicated on what Matthew Steggle has called the ‘poetics of personation’, creating fictional versions of the playwright and his contemporaries. But the ‘poetics of personation’ encompasses not just modern lives but ancient ones, too. Jonson’s play resurrects Virgil, Tibullus, Horace and Ovid based on extended passages of translation from their works. Poetaster thus actively stages the dynamics of biofictional reading. But in this multiplicity of characters ancient Lives and texts mingle and merge. Ovid enacts episodes from the biography of the emperor who banished him, Gallus belies his ancient life, regaining the favour of the emperor who – according to the biographical tradition – forced him to commit suicide. Issues are complicated further when Jonson’s ancient and modern ‘poetics of personation’ contaminate each other: Ovid mirrors the recently dead Marlowe; Crispinus and Demetrius figure Jonson’s rivals Marston and Dekker. Above all, Jonson himself lurks behind the figure of Horace, as the gap between ancient texts and modern biofictions allows the play to explore the political tensions between the poet and the state and the responsibilities of authorship.