- Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2011–2012
Because the Titanic passenger list was incompleteAnd no one saw me off in EnglandOr expected me in New YorkI am dead, unmourned, lost to the sea.
—From “Alfred O. Nemo: Dead, Forgotten,” by Morton D. Rich
Empathy is one of the most beautiful things about human nature. But if we don’t recognize other people’s differences and their unique circumstances, we really don’t understand them.
—Marianne Noble
To play and create with one another, to share one’s aliveness with another, to feel one’s self grow, expand, and become because of one’s relation to another, to feel free to change and to welcome another’s capacity to change—what else could be so transformative.
—Kay Yount
Phyllis Wachter, compiler of Biography’s annual bibliography for over twenty years, continues to teach and conduct life writing research.
Aiko Yamamoto is a PhD student in English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. She is studying literature of Hawai‘i and Oceania, decolonial theory and literature, and histories of ‘āina-based activism. She was raised in Kāne‘ohe.
Books
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Focuses on themes of anonymity in autobiography, autoportrait, and autofiction by Annie Ernaux, Pierre Michon, and Pierre Bergounioux.
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English translation of 1885 autobiography, first by a Muslim South Asian woman and one of the earliest in Urdu. [End Page 690]
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“Sociopolitical trajectories” of five religious elite families provide insights into local politics, revolutionary movements, and the “logic of kinship ties and the nature of Arabo-Islamic genealogical literature.”
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Through over seventy biographical sketches, surveys the history and diversity of gay lives, ranging from ancient China and Egypt to the present.
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Uses Johnson’s and Thrale’s connections to swimming and other sports and physical activities to explore eighteenth-century medical discourses of health and exercise.
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Focuses on the deliberate incompleteness of Franklin’s life writing, placing it in a tradition stretching from Bunyan to Tocqueville.
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Reception study of James tracks the struggles over constructing and controlling literary reputations, representations, and markets.
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Recuperates the lives of Florestine Perrault Collins and the Louisiana Creoles and African Americans she photographed between 1920 and 1949.
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Ethnoarchaeological investigation documenting what the material worlds of contemporary US families reveal about our social identities.
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Traces the evolution of historical writing and autobiography in Catalan texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries.
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Focuses on the unstable worldviews emerging from evolving transatlantic reader responses to adventure, captivity, antislavery, servant, and freeman narratives. [End Page 691]
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Eight narratives...