Experimental Life Writing Today

(Hardback)

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This comprehensive volume offers compelling critical essays surveying the myriad forms of innovation in contemporary Anglophone life writing. Experimental Writing Today provides a historical and critical context for examining avant-garde tendencies in biography and autobiography and outlines the poetics of experimental life writing.

With sections exploring autofiction, biofiction, paramemoir, autotheory, graphic memoir, eco-memoir and the lyric essay as experimental genres of life writing, this volume features chapters devoted to themes and concepts such as illness, disability, mourning, relationality and place. The reader can find essays examining such formal aspects and devices as fragmentation, narration and point of view, catalogue and the use of photographs in experimental life writing.

To ensure clarity and consistency, each chapter follows the same structure: a theoretical discussion of a given genre, theme or device, comprising a brief discussion of its various aspects and examples, followed by a close reading of a chosen text. Case studies are devoted to significant contemporary works by authors such as Hazel V. Carby, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Garrta, Karen Green, Vena Groarke, Han Kang, Mary Karr, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Maggie Nelson, Ruth Ozeki, Mark Tredinnick, Una, D.J. Waldie and Wim Wenders. The volume is dedicated to exploring innovative forms of, and in, contemporary Anglophone life writing, and makes an important contribution to a rich and burgeoning field of interdisciplinary practice and research.

Author Bio

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the cole Normale Suprieure de Lyon, France. She is the author of seven academic books, including Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writers Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), and co-editor of over 20 monographs and special issues of academic journals.

Wojciech Drag is Associate Professor at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is the author of three books, including Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature: Art of Crisis (2020). He co-edited (with Vanessa Guignery) The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction and three other volumes.