This collection of essays examines the interconnections between the personal and the political through the study of autobiography and, more broadly, life writing, in the English-speaking worlds since the twentieth century.The authors of this book look at how autobiography, memoir, autofiction, and hybrid forms of life writing become powerful means of negotiating identity, redressing injustice, and reimagining community. From explorations of sexuality, motherhood, trauma, and creative self-fashioning to engagements with history, postcolonial experience, Indigenous traditions, and environmental awareness, the essays demonstrate how individual voices intervene in larger cultural and political debates.Following the theories of, among others, Philippe Lejeune on the autobiographical pact, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson on life writing, Paul John Eakin on the ethics of self-representation, and more recent work on affect, postcolonial and queer studies, and ecocriticism, this collection foregrounds the political stakes of telling one's own story. It shows how writing the self is never merely a private gesture but a dialogic act, capable of unsettling dominant narratives and opening new spaces for resistance, recognition, and change.
