Life Writing and Space

Eveline Kilian, Hope Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317105213
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

How does our ability, desire or failure to locate ourselves within space, and with respect to certain places, effect the construction and narration of our identities? Approaching recordings and interpretations of selves, memories and experiences through the lens of theories of space and place, this book brings the recent spatial turn in the Humanities to bear upon the work of life writing. It shows how concepts of subjectivity draw on spatial ideas and metaphors, and how the grounding and uprooting of the self is understood in terms of place. The different chapters investigate ways in which selves are reimagined through relocation and the traversing of spaces and texts. Many are concerned with the politics of space: how racial, social and sexual topographies are navigated in life writing. Some examine how focusing on space, rather than time, impacts upon auto/biographical form. The book blends sustained theoretical reflections with textual analyses and also includes experimental contributions that explore independencies between spaces and selves by combining criticism with autobiography. Together, they testify that life writing can hardly be thought of without its connection to space.

Index

1. Ainsworth, William Harrison 26
2. Old Saint Paul’s 26
3. akathisia 68
4. Algeria vi, 12, 45, 123–36
5. Independence 125–6, 130–31
6. Althaus, Hans-Joachim 79, 86
7. Alÿs, Francis 203
8. Anglo-Jewish 152, 155
9. anorexia 131–2
10. Anzaldúa, Gloria 13, 18
11. Appadurai, Arjun 7, 18, 186, 194
12. archive 6, 15, 138, 152, 167–79
13. Aristotle 59, 76, 88
14. Armstrong, Isobel 30, 34, 39
15. Attlee, James vi, ix, 15–16, 197–208
16. Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey ix, xiii, 15, 197–9, 201–3, 208
17. Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight 2011 ix, xiii, 16, 197, 203–4, 208
18. Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line ix, 198, 208
19. Auden, Wystan Hugh 41–2, 51, 55, 94, 96, 99
20. Augé, Marc 7, 18, 60–61, 69–71, 128, 135, 185–6, 194
21. autobiographical pact 127
22. autofiction 10, 91

1. Bachelard, Gaston xiii, 3, 8–9, 17–18, 29–30, 34, 39, 58–9, 71, 101–2, 192, 209, 216–17, 194, 209, 216–...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Spatial Dimensions of Life Writing
• I Relocating and Reimagining the Self
• II Traversing Spaces and Texts
• III Contested Spaces, Precarious Lives
• IV Space and the Form of Life Writing
• Index