Experimental Life Writing Today - (New Directions in Life Narrative) (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first critical study of innovation in contemporary life writing offering a combination of contextual overview and analytical case-study.

Book Synopsis

This comprehensive volume offers compelling critical essays surveying the myriad forms of innovation in contemporary Anglophone life writing. Experimental Life Writing Today provides a historical and critical context for examining avant-garde tendencies in biography and autobiography and outlines the poetics of experimental life writing.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a selection of experimental genres of life writing: autofiction, biofiction, paramemoir, autotheory, graphic memoir, photo-memoir, eco-memoir and the lyric essay. Part Two includes chapters concerned with the following themes, concepts and devices set in the context of experimental life writing: illness, disability, mourning, relationality, place, catalogue, narration and fragmentation.

To ensure clarity and consistency, each chapter follows the same structure: a theoretical discussion of a given notion, comprising a brief discussion of its various aspects and examples, followed by a close reading of a chosen text. Case studies are devoted to significant contemporary works by authors such as Hazel V. Carby, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Garréta, Karen Green, Vona Groarke, Han Kang, Mary Karr, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Maggie Nelson, Ruth Ozeki, Mark Tredinnick, Una, D.J. Waldie and Wim Wenders. The volume is dedicated to exploring innovative forms of, and in, contemporary Anglophone life writing, and it makes an important contribution to a rich and burgeoning field of interdisciplinary practice and research.

Review Quotes

"This is an essential text for anyone interested in experimental forms of life writing, and indeed anyone interested in life writing in its various genres, subgenres, topics and approaches. Thanks to its vast range of case studies, it is also a key text for anyone interested in contemporary writing." --Lucia Boldrini, Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

About the Author

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. She is the author of seven academic books, including Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer's Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), and co-editor of over 20 monographs and special issues of academic journals.

Wojciech Drag is Associate Professor at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is the author of two books, including Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature: Art of Crisis (2020). He has co-edited (with Vanessa Guignery) The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (2019) and three other volumes.