A global array of contributors explore the interplay between translation and circulation, mediums and materialities, and aesthetics and politics in how life writing is shaped by and becomes world literature.
We live in the age of popular self-representation in that most people around the globe either produce or consume autobiographical material: memoirs, selfies, blogs, etc. The current volume investigates this global phenomenon and examines how life writing and world literature converge. Why do some personal stories get “picked up,” translated, circulated, and taught in classrooms, while others remain moored in local waters? Do autobiographical stories that travel widely have something in common about them? Or is it the other way around, is it our notion of “world literature” that imposes uniform expectations on these diverse texts? And what can we gain from studying these two fields in conjunction?
Life Writing as World Literature brings together experts who map regional and local autobiographical traditions from six continents. These scholars explore the dynamic interplay between local and global aesthetics and sociopolitical concerns, presenting case studies that include prison narratives from communist regimes, Japanese diaries, multilingual Caribbean memoirs, Indian auto/biographical comics, and stories by Taiwanese domestic workers.
To understand how and why some personal stories enter global dissemination, contributors inquire into translation, market mechanisms, and circulation patterns, while also exploring the affordances of new media and materialities when recording contemporary lives. Life Writing as World Literature brings a fresh perspective to both fields – world literature and life writing – opening up exciting avenues of research.

lgrsnf/Life Writing as World Literature.pdf

Helga Lenart-Cheng and Ioana Luca

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

United States, United States of America

Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Life Writing and World Literature: Introduction
Part I: Frames of Reading
Chapter 1: Collection, Connection, Translation, Comparison: The Provocations of Life Writing as World Literature
Chapter 2: Auto/biographical Comics in World Literature: Gaps and Silences
Chapter 3: Life Writing and Citational Justice in the Context of World Literature
Part II: From Local Traditions to Global Concerns
Chapter 4: An African in the World: Noni Jabavu’s Memoirs as World Literature
Chapter 5: “A Writer of the World”: Peter Abrahams’s Autobiographical Texts, South Africa, and World Literature
Chapter 6: Rock-Star, Comedian, “Working Class Man”: Popular Memoir and Celebrity Migrant Life Writing in Contemporary Australia
Chapter 7: Caribbean Life Writing as World Literature
Part III: Institutionalization, Circulation, Translation
Chapter 8: Premodern Japanese Life Writing: Canonization, Translation, Adaptation, and Worlding
Chapter 9: Whose Life (Narrative) Is It Anyways? Circulation, Translation, and Unbelonging in Gina Saraceni’s Adriático and Raquel Rivas Rojas’s Inventario para después de la guerra
Chapter 10: Worlding Precarious Lives: Southeast Asian Workers in Taiwan
Part IV: Life Writing Local History and Global Memory
Chapter 11: Surviving Genres: Life Writing and the Communist Carceral Experience
Chapter 12: A Nicaraguan Woman’s Auto/Biographical Resistance: Gioconda Belli and Literary [R]Evolution
Chapter 13: Globalizing Caste: The Contemporary Dalit Feminist Memoir
Part V: Worldliness, Materialities, and Activism
Chapter 14: Travel, Disease, and Life Writing as World Literature: Jack London, Audre Lorde, Gao Xingjian
Chapter 15: Children’s Drawings from Ukraine: Drawing Life, Drawing the World
Chapter 16: Activism and the Graphic Memoir: Between the Personal and the Political
Afterword: Life History and the Literatures of the World: Notes toward a Provocation
Notes on Contributors
Index

2025-03-28