Routledge The Routledge Auto Biography Studies Reader (Routledge Literature Readers)

Product Description 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. Review "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 About the Author 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.