This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity.
The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformative possibilities of life writing as it engages with issues of resistance, recuperation, re-inscribing individual and collective memories, histories, and promotes an understanding of multicultural others. Focusing on the multiple ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of life writing has helped to reimagine and redefine individual and collective identities in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, the collection breaks new ground by initiating a cross-cultural perspective in life writing studies. The book aims to encourage critical engagement with a vastly growing body of literature that has seen a publishing and translation boom in contemporary times, both globally and in India. With life writing emerging as a robust area of research, this edited collection provides a much-needed impetus to critically engage with issues of self-representation, memory and identity in recent times.
This volume will serve as a significant and rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, comparative studies, cultural studies, history, indigenous studies and digital and media studies.
Edited by:
Mukul Chaturvedi (University of Delhi India)
Imprint: Routledge India
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 540g
ISBN: 9781032728896
ISBN 10: 1032728892
Pages: 285
Publication Date: 27 March 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part I - Introduction Part II - Auto/biographical Fiction and History 1. Writing Lives, Re-membering History in Easterine Kire’s Mari 2. In Other Words: Collaboration and it’s (Dis)Contents in Elena Poniatowska’s Here’s to You, Jesusa 3. Re-imagining Courtesan as Virangana in Kenize Mourad’s In the City of Gold and Silver 4. Beyond Fact and Fiction: Towards a multifaceted Tibetan Life Writing Part III - Narrating Literary Selves/ Fictional Lives 5. Joginder Paul: The Inextricable Collaboration of Life and Writing 6. “Did This Really Happen?”: Amit Chaudhuri’s Acknowledgement of the Autobiographical 7. Life Writing and the Poetics of Temporal Experience in Woolf and Sartre Part IV - Fragmented Lives /Contingent Selves 8. Renegotiating Narrative Coherence: Edouard Louis Autobiographical Novel History of Violence as “Multidirectional Testimony” of Sexual Trauma 9. Baroque Cross Dressers in the Orient: Severo Sarduy and Pierre Loti 10. The ‘Imagined Author’: Contingent Selves in an Anonymous Life Writing Subreddit Part V - Writing Individual / Plural Selves 11. My Story of Us: A Comparative Analysis of Alberto Prunetti and Fan Yusu’s Working-Class Life Writing 12. Stories of Two Gandhians: Caste and Gender Intersectionality in Odia Autobiographies 13. Life Writing as Documentation of a Community: A Reading of K.A. Gunasekaran’s Vadu Part VI - Memory, Exile, and Identity 14. Inhabiting In-Between Spaces: Fractured Identities and Self-representation in Najat El Hachmi’s life writing 15. Death-Travelers, Buddhas, and Comics: The Graphic Memoir of an American delok 16. The Refugee Writes Back: Interrogating and Resisting the Australian border regimes in No Friend but the mountains
Mukul Chaturvedi is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Zakir Husain College, University of Delhi, India.
Reviews for Life Writing, Representation and Identity: Global Perspectives
‘This sparkling, intellectually provocative collection marks a significant expansion of the very capacious field of life writing studies. The collection provides an important corrective too, to current global scholarship in the field, in showcasing the outstanding work being done in this area by South Asian scholars in particular. The book will be important reading for scholars of life writing and associated fields, internationally, including postgraduate students.’ —Dr Victoria K Haskins, Fellow, Australian Academy of Humanities; Professor of History, University of Newcastle, Australia; Former founding director of Purai Global Indigenous History Centre, University of Newcastle and Series Editor, Empire’s Other Histories, Bloomsbury Academic
