There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.

This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.

Given the paradoxical media environment for gay athletes and the struggle they face in shaping their own stories, the sports autobiography offers a rich and understudied site to trace the evolution of gay athlete stories in the media. This chapter analyzes five of the most prominent gay athlete autobiographies to date, told over a three-decade time period from 1977 to 2007, to reveal the discourses athletes use to construct their identities surrounding sport, sexuality, athleticism, and identity. The project offers a comparative analysis of the major themes that emerged in gay athlete autobiographies and how these stories were shaped over time and across different cultural and sporting contexts.

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explore five works of gay literary autobiographical writing about the 1970s. These autobiographies by Michael Rumaker, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Essex Hemphill, and Bernard Cooper paint an ambivalent picture of the decade, a period in which the unprecedented rewards and celebratory tenor of sexual liberation did not merely erase the traumas of the past: homophobia, self-hatred, and abusive relationships. Most of these writers are quite different from one another; they belonged to different gay cultural scenes and lived and worked in different cities across the US. By identifying shared themes across their work, however, this chapter illuminates why the 1970s was a pivotal moment in the formation of gay literature as we know it.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

The story of Diognete, a late fifth-century Athenian woman, provides a lens for thinking about how to write the history of women in classical Athens. The introduction considers the value of biographical approaches and other tools which treat women as individual subjects rather than members of categories. It explains the author’s decision to assign names to women whose names are lost or suppressed in the evidence, repositioning them as subjects of their own lives. It argues that the texts on inscribed dedications and gravestones commissioned by women were determined by the women themselves, leaving us with myriad female-authored texts. These texts inform the book’s experiential approach, which focuses on women’s own experiences of their lives.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.

The chapter opens with comments on autobiographical writings by Petrarch, Augustine, Uriel da Costa, Franciscus Junius, Ludvig Freiherr von Holberg, Jan Amos Komenský, and Leibniz. There are seen as attempts to make sense of one’s own life circumstances, while aware that absolute knowledge of one’s own life is not possible. This is particularly salient when it comes to understanding one’s sufferings. Following this, there is a discussion of the concepts of public and fatherland, comparing contemporary times to olden times, primarily Greek and Roman antiquity. The public is understood as a kind of collective moral and legal arbiter, and language plays an important role in its existence. This is seen to be particularly important for what is called a public of the Hebrews. The contemporary public is that of Christianity, but also of commerce, schools, and universities. A fatherland is explained in terms of familial bond to a community and a link in the chain of humanity. This is followed by a discussion of Machiavelli, Hugo Grotius, and Leibniz.

This chapter examines how elite women used writing to establish expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Beatrice Webb (1858–1943). It considers the early work as a social investigator that she undertook before marrying the prominent Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The Webbs’ co-authored political writings are well-studied by historians, and Beatrice’s diaries and autobiography interest feminist scholars – this chapter combines these perspectives. It explores how Beatrice sought public recognition through writing, analysing her choice of topics, styles, and intended audiences. It also considers paths she avoided, shaped by the constraints of a woman writing on traditionally ‘masculine’ issues. Beatrice’s personal archive, particularly her diary, reveals her pursuit of influence and expertise on social and economic matters, from low wages to state welfare reform. Her approach highlights the challenges female authors faced when entering male-dominated genres like political economy. A final section discusses her autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1926), which became an authoritative account of the Victorian era. This work deepens our understanding of how Beatrice’s identity evolved as a writer and illustrates the complex relationship between gender, authorship, and expertise in political writing.

This essay examines the remarkable phenomenon of “life stories,” which the Spanish Inquisition required of its defendants after 1561. The narratives offered by defendants fit into a wider cultural context in two ways. First, they match a rise in autobiographical consciousness which was increasingly present in all sorts of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century. Second, the life stories demanded by Spanish inquisitors also.

An account of the making of the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, an autobiographical inquiry into the circumstances and legacy of the suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother. (The production, in rehearsal in the fall and winter of 1976, held an open rehearsal in December before opening the following spring.) The chapter considers the Wooster Group’s approach to acting (distinct from the style of its predecessor, the Performance Group), the visual art sources for the production’s imagery and structure, the use of recording technology, the role of the spectator, and the nature of privacy.

A comprehensive examination of the plays and prose of Adrienne Kennedy, with particular focus on two works she premiered in 1976: A Rat’ s Mass / Procession in Shout, an operatic adaptation of her early play A Rat’ s Mass, composed and directed by the jazz composer and pianist Cecil Taylor; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, a play derived from Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood film and her memory of her brother’s devastating car accident. The chapter also explores Kennedy’s experiments in visual art, with particular attention to her own and her mother’s scrapbooks, her assemblage of photographed objects ("Cherished Objects from the Past"), her use of quotation, and the mixed-media nature of her manuscripts.

Chapter 1 takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. It contrasts Stein’s love for state lines with the writings of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. By reading contrapuntally between Stein and Zitkála-Šá, this chapter considers autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature. In response to technics of automated transport, the form was retooled by Stein and Zitkála-Šá in ways that make the overlap of US geography and Native space visible as a differential space.

This chapter discusses the nature of the Selbstzeugnisse left by the merchants in this study and locates the texts in the history of autobiography, ego-documents, and similar self-narratives. It also explains that no other regions in northern Europe produced texts like these during this period (1400–1600) and that the German-speaking regions from which they come was then emerging as a major center of early modern capitalism.

This chapter offers a survey of published and unpublished autobiographies by writers born in the period 1790–1901 that tell the story of the ‘sailor in the family’. It identifies a set of common narrative motifs within these ‘maritime memoirs’ that cluster around the figure of the family sailor – including tales of travel, separation, dispersal, orphanhood, vanishings, reinventions, and improbable returns. Interweaving readings of autobiographies and family myths, alongside the broader literary forms of the Bildungsroman, adventure fiction, fairy tale and waif stories, the chapter shows how global maritime experience shaped the composition of ordinary families and the stories they told about themselves. The maritime relations of this chapter also reveal alternative family structures, beyond the nuclear family order, that were flexibly adapted and shaped to the various realities of mobility, risk and opportunity.

Chapter 7 draws on Nietzsche’s autobiographical writings to focus in on his philosophical methods. Here I identify the three features of genealogical analysis. First, Nietzsche attests to being gripped and limited by theological and moral prejudices, which, as he further suggests, functioned to constrict his evaluative horizons (GM P 3). Second, Nietzsche substantiates further that those deeply entrenched patterns of value and habits of thought, which (non-consciously or pre-reflectively) shaped his outlook, also oriented him in a particular way toward his suffering. As a way of combating that precarity, he adopts, for a time at least, thoroughly moralized responses: He warded off precarity through decadence in the forms of either world-denial (pessimism) or ascetic self-renunciation. Finally, he confirms that refracting these automatic responses through his long-drawn-out illnesses opened up, for him, a new line of sight.

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.