The Routledge Auto Biography Studies Reader

The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing.

Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections—Foundations, Transformations, and Futures—each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.

“" The Reader 's credentials are impeccable, with a foreword by Sidonie Smith, contributions from key figures in the field such as James Olney, and the inclusion of other seminal work including Paul de Man's "Autobiography as De-Facement." This is, then, a diverse and far-reaching approach to the topic: comics crop up in more than one chapter, and the book is able to boast a wide range of methodologies and themes, including interdisciplinarity, disability, agency, celebrity, and even genealogical approaches and DNA testing. This is a highly enjoyable and engaging study which takes in a variety of contrasting texts." -”

"The Reader’s credentials are impeccable, with a foreword by Sidonie Smith, contributions from key figures in the field such as James Olney, and the inclusion of other seminal work including Paul de Man’s "Autobiography as De-Facement." This is, then, a diverse and far-reaching approach to the topic: comics crop up in more than one chapter, and the book is able to boast a wide range of methodologies and themes, including interdisciplinarity, disability, agency, celebrity, and even genealogical approaches and DNA testing. This is a highly enjoyable and engaging study which takes in a variety of contrasting texts." - Forum on Modern Language Studies

"The Routledge Auto/biography Studies Reader is timely, dense and provocative, and a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour." - Trev Lynn Broughton, Life Writing

"Chansky and Hipchen offer carefully edited and organized selected essays tracing key debates in a one-stop volume that marks the multidisciplinary, multimediated direction of the field." - Margaretta Jolly, Oxford Bibliography of Biography and Autobiography

Ricia Anne Chansky is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is the co-editor of the scholarly journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and editor of the forthcoming volumes Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives and Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. She also founded the International Auto/Biography Association – Chapter of the Americas.Emily Hipchen is Professor of Writing at the University of West Georgia, USA. She is co-editor of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and co-editor of the volume Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez.

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