This chapter examines life writing in comics through the influential zine King-Cat Comics and Stories, created and independently self-published by John Porcellino since 1989. The various forms of expression employed in King-Cat generate a kind of unmediated directness between Porcellino and the reader, where the mode of address, tone, and style is constantly modulating. King-Cat is a form of life writing that uses the zine format and, in this case, comics featured within the zine, to foreground its aporetic nature. Constantly making the reader switch gears between different kinds of information in different forms, King-Cat makes the aporetic experience almost second nature for the reader. The intra- and intertextual dynamics created by Porcellino’s life writing practice implicate the reader in an animistic medium of uncertainty, where what the text “asks” of the reader shifts in register even in sections of the same page. This kind of reading process challenges traditional linear notions of time and suspends the location of identity within a text, thus suggesting a dynamic communal vision for life writing and, perhaps, for viewing life itself.

This Introduction highlights the importance of this collection - the first of its kind - for showcasing the paradigm-shifting quality of the Anne Lister archive. It describes Lister’s growing importance to a range of disciplines that include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, life writing and travel writing. It outlines how Lister’s transgression of gender and sexual boundaries not only marked and shaped every aspect of her lived experience, but also has challenged our understanding of the evolution of sexual and gendered narratives up to the present. Decoding Anne Lister includes interviews and essays on Lister’s queer sexuality and gender variance, her role as a diarist, her pushing of gender barriers through her involvement in local politics and in the managing of her Shibden Hall estate, her adventurous and at times gender-defying travels through Britain, Europe and the Russian Caucasus, and on the highly successful adaptation of the Lister diaries into the BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack. Each chapter shows how the Lister diaries have helped to reconfigure the more traditional trajectories of nineteenth-century histories of gender and sexuality, and of social and political life.

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.

This is the first question that Augustine asks about himself in the Confessions, and it begins with a stumbling into speech. He does not know where he comes from. This is the question which stalls Sophocles’ Oedipus in his domineering argument with Teiresias, starts his search for his parentage, and thus begins his downfall into knowledge and self-destruction. Oedipus does not know where he comes from, an ignorance displayed even and especially when, with multiply-layered ironies, he calls himself ‘the know-nothing Oedipus’. It is also the foundational question for Freud, reader of Oedipus, who insists that for all the productive work of analysis of the self we can never fully and properly know our own self, and certainly not the answer to where the self comes from. Augustine specifies huc ‘to here’, which he immediately glosses as ‘this life that dies or death that lives’. The horizon of expectation is defined – in a way that is alien to Sophocles or Freud – by this definition of a life-time as a hesitation between a journey towards death, or an already living death: a theologically defined time shaped between the already and the not yet.

Whether in biography, the biographical novel, the memoir or various other subgenres of life writing, the writer must be responsibly committed to both truth and imagination, to both fact and fiction. Jay Parini’s chapter considers a wide range of life writing and observes the various priorities afforded to truth and imagination in the work. Whatever access to archives, testimonies and evidence life writers need, they need above all, in Parini’s phrase, ‘access to the resources of language’.

This essay addresses developments in religious life writing in the Romantic period through examination of auto/biographies, journals, and letters in both print and manuscript. Particular interests include the genre of the spiritual conversion narrative, literary uses of confession and conversion, life writing and religious historiography, and women’s auto/biographical practices and place within this tradition.

Trish Salah contextualizes the broad post-2010 emergence of transgender fiction in a longer history of earlier trans and queer fiction and theory while arguing that “trans genre writing” has found recent prominence as a new minor literature. Particular challenges have led trans writers to innovate at the levels of language and aesthetics, perspective (collective, but not homogeneous), and genre, among others. Moreover, these works thematize and challenge norms and imperatives of empire, race, history, visibility, and geography.

In her chapter, Thomas reads pre-1800 legal writings about people of African descent as Black life writing. She expands autobiographical writing beyond an account of an individual’s growth and development in cases of people of African descent to narratives regarding Black people as active agents forming an embodied community racialized and marginalized by the dominant culture. Thomas argues that Black writers published autobiographical writings and also wove personal narratives into legal documents from fidavits to freedom petitions, as well as into traditional literary forms such as poems and letters. However, during the same colonial and early American eras, people of European descent inscribed details about Black peoples in a variety of historical records such as the census, bills of sale, antislavery pamphlets, court records, and runaway slave advertisements to accentuate their differences from and inability to assimilate into the majority culture.

Moody’s introduction observes that works of African American autobiography predate even the oft-cited 1760 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, and the 1783 petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filed by Belinda Royall (Sutton). Moody argues the genre of Black life writing has persistently appealed to African American authors telling life stories in promoting diverse causes from a range of African-descended ethnic backgrounds. She contends that the financial rewards of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming — and the testimonies it has generated — reveal African American readers look to each other for life narratives of diverse Black experiences that enable the construction, constitution, and promulgation of a credible Black self. Moreover, Moody asserts, the persistent cultural shifts of African American life writing as literary and historical phenomena have been well documented. Joining a long trajectory of critical studies, the introduction establishes the prominence of Black life writing across US history.

This chapter explores how feminist criticism’s valorization of agency has at times erased disabled women’s accounts of bodily and mental pain. While praised in feminist circles, the concept of recovery, in particular, exists in tension with disability studies’ refusal of narratives that privilege ability. In framing this interrogation of recovery as a crip feminist practice, I turn to disabled women’s life writing, which charts how recovery’s normalizing impulse threatens to either misrepresent or overlook women’s impairments. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), Anne Finger’s “Helen and Frida,” and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering (2018) redefine recovery as living with and alongside disability rather than in spite of it.

The consistent tendency in Caribbean literature towards generic transgression – blurring of generic boundaries – is particularly evident in the genre of life writing, which not only spans fiction, poetry, memoir, auto/biography, essay, and theoretical formulations but also often reimagines the nature of each of these forms of writing. A comparative examination of specific works within the genre reveals a varied terrain between narrations of the individual life and a variety of communities and affiliations. The range includes Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave; different iterations of the autobiographical novel exemplified in Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin; biomythographies such as Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and poetic expressions such as Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’, Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Negus’, and Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The possible yields of conversation between more traditional forms such as Austin Clarke’s Pigtails ’n Breadfruit and essays and genre-crossing essay collections such as Edward Baugh’s ‘Cuckoo and Culture’ and Samuel Selvon’s ‘Three into One Can’t Go’, further extend the lenses through which Caribbean autobiography may be filtered. This chapter examines multiple ways in which the autobiographical impulse appears in various traditional and crossover genres.

During 48 hours in October 2017, nearly one million women shared the words ‘MeToo’ on social media and brought a new level of visibility to the old problem of sexual violence in women’s lives. Words were central, but images quickly emerged to visualise a graphic witness that was testimonial rather than confessional. This chapter explores how the histories underlying the MeToo movement were revealed by the co-evolution of words and images in the early months of a resurgent public conversation about sexual violence and accountability. Taken together, they illustrate the testimonial trajectories of women’s accounts of harm in a public sphere primed to doubt and discredit them. In the absence of intersectional feminist analysis about the history of advocacy for survivors by women of colour and the harm of chronic and pervasive doubt, blame, and injustice in women’s lives, MeToo narratives fragment into confessional shards that are as likely to cut the victim as the victimiser. However, contextualising the MeToo movement within the testimonial tradition of race and gendered self-representation and the history of feminist advocacy for survivors explains the power of graphic witness.

This chapter considers the importance of life writing to the development of Decadent literary production and to the afterlives of the Decadent movement. Beginning with Walter Pater, we explore the creative approach Decadent writers took to biography and the imagined fictional life. If Wilde, Pater, and John Addington Symonds established the pattern of Decadent life writing, Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman deployed its practices and politics as they recalled Wilde’s tragic downfall and early death. In the early years of the twentieth century the history of British literary Decadence was still very much contested, and alongside life writing emerged the memoir and the period study that framed the 1890s in relation to the literary innovations of modernism. The creative approach to Decadent life writing waned in the second half of the twentieth century as professional literary critics sought to develop authoritative versions of Decadent biography, a practice seemingly at odds with earlier Decadent practices.