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Life Writing: The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art
Editor: Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan
Date Of Publication: May 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0526-1
Isbn: 1-4438-0526-2
In our age, self-publishing, self-broadcasting, and telling stories about our own lives and the lives of others are all-pervasive. This is also the age of the witness, the age of testimony in which first-hand accounts, personal experience, life change and evolution are valued, for good or ill, over distanced reflection. What are we to make of all this telling of lives? The essays collected in Life Writing: The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art from writers and academics associated with the Centre for Life Narrative Studies at Kingston University in London, begin to address this very question, and in doing so demonstrate the fluidity and diversity of life writing itself. The remit of the Centre for Life Narratives is to rise to the challenge poised to writers, teachers and researchers alike by this very fluidity and diversity in our discipline and is exemplified here with contributions from academics, curators, editors and biographers, including Neal Ascherson,Victoria Glendinning, Professor Kathryn Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Blake Morrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This collection of essays from CLN offers the reader our founding contribution to the debates that surround this era-defining genre and as such presents both the state of the art and the spirit of our age.

MEG JENSEN is Deputy Head of the School of Humanities at Kingston University in London, where she is Director of the Centre for Life narratives, and teaches both Creative Writing and English Literature. Recent work includes her forthcoming novel, Saints in Staten Island and a study of the novels of Virginia Woolf, (in M. Shiach, ed, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (CUP, 2007).

JANE JORDAN is a Senior Lecturer at Kingston University and a specialist in Victorian literature. She is also Director of the MA in English on which she teaches classes in Life Writing. Jane is the author of two biographies, Josephine Butler (John Murray, 2001; Continuum, 2007) and Kitty O’Shea; An Irish Affair (Sutton Publishing, 2005), and is currently writing a literary biography of the Victorian popular novelist, ‘Ouida’.

“Do you speak life narrative? Does today’s confessional memoir signal the end of shame? And what was the truth about Mrs Beeton? Narratives of lives continue to fascinate in contemporary culture, and Life Writing the Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art offers cogent arguments as to why. While Hegel thought that the lives of leaders captured the spirit of his age, in the 21st century we are treated to insights from life stories across the arts, sciences and political scene. From Lawrence Goldman on the Dictionary of National Biography to Sarah Long on the life stories of museum objects to Suzette Henke on cosmic auto/biography, anyone interested in life writing will find much to enjoy in this fine collection.”

—Margaretta Jolly, Editor, The Encyclopedia of Life Writing, The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, University of Sussex

“This collection brings together writers, thinkers and artists in productive and imaginative ways. All the participants are consistently alert to language, experience and culture; the essays, interviews and reflections are wonderfully suggestive. The editors have arranged ideas creatively and wih critical sensitivity to old and new paradigms, so the whole book will offer much to scholars, students and everybody who has a life.”

—Clare Brant, Co-Director, Centre for Life-Writing Research, King's College London

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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