The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing. Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections—Foundations, Transformations, and Futures—each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, Sidonie Smith General Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky Part 1: Foundations Foundations Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky 1. Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction, James Olney 2. Conception and Origin of Autobiography, Georg Misch 3. Conditions and Limits of Autobiography, Georges Gusdorf 4. Autobiography as De-facement, Paul de Man 5. The Autobiographical Pact, Philippe Lejeune 6. Design and Lie in Modern American Autobiography, Timothy Dow Adams 7. Is There a Canon of Autobiography?, Eugene Stelzig 8. Reflections of a Reluctant Anthologist, Arnold Krupat 9. Forgotten Voices of Afro-American Autobiography, 1865–1930, William L. Andrews 10. Between Lines: Constructing the Political Self, Magdalena Maíz Peña and Luis H. Peña 11. The Impact of Critical Theory on the Study of Autobiography: Marginality, Gender, and Autobiographical Practice, Sidonie Smith 12. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative, Marlene Kadar 13. Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing, G. Thomas Couser 14. Biography and Autobiography: Intermixing the Genres, Lois W. Banner 15. Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree, Julia Watson Part 2: Transformations Transformations Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky 16. Kathie Lee Gifford and the Commodification of Autobiography, Martin Danahay 17. Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs, Susannah B. Mintz 18. Memorializing Memory: Marlon Riggs and Life Writing in Tongues Untied and Black Is Black Ain’t, Harvey Young 19. Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography, Jack/Judith Halberstam 20. Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity, Leigh Gilmore 21. Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self, Arturo Arias 22. Recasting Indigenous Lives along the Lines of Western Desire: Editing, Autobiography, and the Colonizing Project, Alison Ravenscroft 23. Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity, Helen M. Buss 24. Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography, Alfred Hornung 25. The Incomplete Return, Isabelle de Courtivron 26. Letters as/not a Genre, Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley 27. Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity, Julie Rak 28. Autographics: The Seeing "I" of the Comics, Gillian Whitlock 29. What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?, Paul John Eakin 30. Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism, Charles Altieri Part 3: Futures Futures Introduction, Ricia Anne Chansky 31. Family Matters, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 32. Living Autoethnography: Connecting Life and Research – Faith Wambura Ngunjiri, Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez, and Heewon Chang 33. Cultural Ecology, Literature, and Life Writing, Hubert Zapf 34. His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman, Cynthia Huff and Joel Haefner 35. Engendering an Alternative Approach to Otherness in African Women’s Autobiography, Folasade Hunsu 36. Subjects in the Margins, Leonor Arfuch 37. Memoirs of Return: Saidiya Hartman, Eva Hoffman, and Daniel Mendelsohn in Conversation with Nancy K. Miller, Nancy K. Miller 38. The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch 39. Comics Form and Narrating Lives, Hillary Chute 40. Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online, Paul Longley Arthur 41. Celebrity Bio Blogs: Hagiography, Pathography, and Perez Hilton, Elizabeth Podnieks 42. Cyberrace, Lisa Nakamura 43. Faith, Doubt, and Textual Identity, Susanna Egan 44. Making the Case for Self-narration Against Autofiction, Arnaud Schmitt 45. Genetic Studies of Life Writing, Philippe Lejeune