Life Writing and Space (Paperback)

Studies into life writing are a growing field of creative-critical inquiry, and Eveline Killian and Hope Wolf have produced a remarkable addition to existing scholarship. Life Writing and Space brings together a mix of established names and up and coming talent who probe the narration of lives through the prism of space. Drawing on work ranging from cultural critics to hardcore (postmodern) theorists and philosophers, this ambitious volume carves out a new territory for scholars and students interested in the intricacies of (auto)biography. Killian and Wolf's Introduction is exemplary: a work of rigorous and original scholarship that sets the bar very high. The individual contributions are varied, yet each in their own way illuminates the spatial aspects of life writing in new ways. Sebastian Groes, University of Roehampton, UKOpening itself to multiple resonances of spatial concepts, Life Writing and Space draws on literary criticism, cultural studies, and critical geographies to show how places and spaces are imagined, produced, and experienced through auto/biographical practices. This richly intertextual study demonstrates the productive potential of framing lives in terms of spatiality and explores different topologies and tropologies of life writing. Eva C. Karpinski, York University, Canada and author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, Translation