Editors’ Note

The 2008–2009 installment of our Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing confirms the trends we’ve identified in earlier installments. The field is continuing to expand; the only real surprise this year is the extent of the growth. This year’s bibliography has over 1,450 entries, as compared 1,300 or so last year—an increase of over 10 percent. The reasons for this have to do with an increase in the representation, though still miniscule, of texts in languages other than English—here French, German, and Spanish—and a notable growth in the number of books, special issues, articles, and dissertations from the social sciences and education fields. As qualitative research becomes more and more influential in these disciplines, work on narrative, memory, oral history, autoethnography and ethnography, is coming to the fore, and this year’s bibliography reflects this.

Some quick comparisons of the numbers. Almost 150 books appear in this year’s list, fifteen more than last year’s. The increase in dissertations is a little smaller—from 134 to 142—but since last year’s total surged up from the mid 80s, we’re still at a peak. In what has become a very clear trend, the number of essays appearing in special issues and edited collections is huge— about 685, up from roughly 650. This year, however, the actual number of special issues and edited collections has gone up a great deal, from 50 to 78. Over forty are edited collections.

The number of articles appearing in regular issues of journals, while still much smaller than those in collections and special issues, has gone up as well, to about 480. A substantial portion of the increase results from the proliferation of articles in education and social science journals.

A couple of other developments should also be noted. First, there are more online journals represented in this bibliography. We’re not talking here about print journals with a strong online presence in a data base like Project Muse. When you find entries this year for articles that don’t seem to have pages, this is not a mistake: the journal is online, and can be accessed through a search on the title. Second, the number of introductory volumes and collections for researchers moving into the field of life writing has really expanded, and especially in the qualitative research fields. The publisher Sage is represented by several volumes here.

It’s also obvious that life writing is becoming an area of great interest in classical, medieval, and early modern studies. Saints lives in Western and Eastern cultures, diaries and letters of women and other traditionally “silent” groups, biographical readings of prominent early texts—life writing is coming to inform the editing, critical, and theoretical practices of scholars whose interests have traditionally been focused elsewhere.

It’s a very exciting, though daunting, time to be interested in life writing. Many of us look at the research being conducted in unfamiliar fields, and wonder whether it really has anything to do with our interests. Others of us can wonder whether the range of activity has extended to the point where there’s really no coherence possible—whether for reasons of language, cultural assumptions, methodological foundations, or sheer numbers.

In any case, as an interdisciplinary quarterly, Biography will continue to publish, review, and record the diverse forms of research devoted to the representation of human lives. The real challenge will be to adapt continually, and even transform our own methods, to remain useful as a major resource in the field.