Name: Writing the Self and the English-Speaking Worlds
SKU: 1-0364-7104-7
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Writing the Self and the English-Speaking Worlds

Life Writing and Politics Since the 20th Century

Edited By: Cédric Courtois, Claire Dubois

£64.99

This collection of essays examines the political power of life writing. From autobiography to memoir, these works show how telling one's own story can negotiate identity, redress injustice, and unsettle dominant narratives, creating new spaces for resistance and change.

This collection of essays examines the interconnections between the personal and the political through the study of autobiography and, more broadly, life writing, in the…

This collection of essays examines the interconnections between the personal and the political through the study of autobiography and, more broadly, life writing, in the English-speaking worlds since the twentieth century.
The authors of this book look at how autobiography, memoir, autofiction, and hybrid forms of life writing become powerful means of negotiating identity, redressing injustice, and reimagining community. From explorations of sexuality, motherhood, trauma, and creative self-fashioning to engagements with history, postcolonial experience, Indigenous traditions, and environmental awareness, the essays demonstrate how individual voices intervene in larger cultural and political debates.
Following the theories of, among others, Philippe Lejeune on the autobiographical pact, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson on life writing, Paul John Eakin on the ethics of self-representation, and more recent work on affect, postcolonial and queer studies, and ecocriticism, this collection foregrounds the political stakes of telling one’s own story. It shows how writing the self is never merely a private gesture but a dialogic act, capable of unsettling dominant narratives and opening new spaces for resistance, recognition, and change.

Cédric Courtois is Senior Lecturer in Anglophone studies at the University of Lille. He specialises in postcolonial literatures, more particularly Anglophone African literatures. His most recent publications include “‘I understand […] closure is something I may never obtain’: (In)consolation in Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief (2022) and Onyi Nwabineli’s Someday, Maybe (2022)” (2024) for E-rea, and “Caring about Plant Subjectivities and Life-Worlds in Niyi Osundare’s Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet (2021), Ben Okri’s Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021) and Tiger Work: Stories, Essays and Poems about Climate Change (2023)” (2024) for Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

Claire Dubois is Professor of Irish History and Culture at the University of Lille (France). She works on the cultural representations of Ireland and the fashioning of an Irish national identity since 1750, through the study of nationalism, visual culture, art and architecture, literature and the press. Her latest book, L’art comme arme en politique. Les combats de Constance Markievicz, was published in 2024. She is currently researching the representations and afterlives of the Irish revolution in France.

Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, Unoma Azuah, Hannah Louise Coombs, Cédric Courtois, Claire Dubois, Margaret Gillespie, Massimiliano Manni, Marie Mianowski, Franck Miroux, Eleonore Obis