...This chapter explores the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. It explains that Bastard Out of Carolina, written by Dorothy Allison, demonstrates how incest represents a critical dissonance in psychoanalysis and law. The limit between autobiography and fiction...

... structures his narrative task as a combination of autobiography, biography, and family history while showcasing how trauma ruptures the boundaries of the autonomous autobiographical “I.” The chapter cites that biography, and autobiography, work to give voice to the dead, even as the dead place limits...

...This chapter examines how Langston Hughes writes an autobiography as a literary genre. There were substantial pressures on a black autobiographer in the United States to construct himself as a subject that would represent African Americans in just the right ways: as valued citizens and loyal...

... and lacked the energy to negotiate the acquisition of additional foreign territories. The chapter details the literary projects Seward took in the last half-year of his life, one of which was an autobiography that exhibits his pre-war thinking and an uncritical account of American progress. It cites...

...This chapter describes Tolstoy's unfinished attempts to write a memoir or autobiography, focusing on how and why he failed. As Tolstoy himself made clear, there were moral, technical, and philosophical difficulties. On the moral side, he feared that a completely truthful account of his life would...

...This chapter analyzes Nancy Alexander Tracy's autobiography, which reminisced about the religious experiences of her youth. It recounts Tracy's attendance to religious meetings in Herkimer County, New York and how she sought Christian conversion privately. It also discusses how Tracy did not unite...

...This chapter examines the current trend of memoirs. Autobiography as a genre has always been defined by formally experimental works, even when critics focused more on its formal and ideological coherence. However, writers of autobiographies carry the paradox of being unique and representative...

...This chapter considers how one writer, Olaudah Equiano, deployed Milton's poetry in his abolitionist autobiography. Equiano's late-eighteenth-century autobiography traces his journey not only from freedom, enslavement, to liberation, and from paganism to Christianity, but also from illiteracy...

... philosophers. It attempts to reclaim Libanius's Autobiography as a narrative within the context of “the life of the holy man,” pointing out common elements in similar pagan and Christian texts. For this purpose, the chapter also considers the Greek Vita Antonii attributed...

...This chapter discusses Roger Martin du Gard's composition of his “Souvenirs littéraires,” a kind of literary autobiography, for Editions Gallimard's “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (Pleiades Library) series. In the summer of 1955, he began his literary memoirs, drawing his materials together...

...This chapter covers the 1871 autobiography of William Henry Seward. It notes that Seward was becoming one of the most important politicians of his generation since he was a reformer that rallied on welcoming immigrants, Roman Catholics, Native Americans and technological advancement...

...This chapter examines the context wherein Prince Prisdang Chumsai (1852–1935) had thrived and was ultimately exiled from. It also discusses Prince Prisdang's “silence”—in particular the reason, which he had pointedly removed from his autobiography, for his falling out of favor with Siam and its...

...This chapter examines a variety of written expressions that may be read in the context of elegy and are attributed to Native American authors. It begins by considering Black Hawk's autobiography Life, published in 1833 by John Barton Patterson. Life was long read...

... Marchale Thomas Patrick Kempe’s guide revision Van Engen John Walters Barbara Elizabeth of Hungary Karant Nunn Susan Marie of Oignies Riehle Wolfgang autobiography Kempe Margery lister priest who reads to Kempe literate practice Kempe Margery distinction Krug Rebecca Staley Lynn comfort...

..., who participated in the liberation campaign that was later dubbed the “Jerry Rescue.” The chapter covers Ward's account of the rescue that is considered both evidence and allegory as it qualifies as eyewitness testimony. It features an excerpt from Ward's autobiography, wherein he related the details...

... yield at once to my desire to write an autobiography.” The letters to Felice are, in a certain way, that autobiography. They must be taken with his other writings and his diaries, but Kafka wrote them to Felice. These letters are the attempt to show the entire person to the beloved, in preparation...

...This introductory chapter considers the limits of autobiography. For many writers, autobiography's domain of first-person particularities and peculiarities offers an opportunity to describe their lives and their thoughts about it. The chapter explains that autobiography seemed to constrain self...

...This chapter provides an overview of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body as a limit-case focused on sexed and gendered self-representation. The autobiography presents certain expectations about how and whether a lesbian author writes a lesbian text. However, Winterson rejects...