Experimental Life Writing Today

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 Garreta, Karen Green, Vena Groerke, 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.

Product details

• Authors: Wojciech Drag, Vanessa Guignery
• Assisted by: Drag Wojciech (Editor), Vanessa Guignery (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 27.11.2025
• EAN: 9781350529915
• ISBN: 978-1-350-52991-5
• No. of pages: 272
• Series: New Directions in Life Narrative
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Art, literature > Biographies, autobiographies; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Biography: literary, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, Memoirs, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / General, Autobiography: literary, Literature & literary studies, Literary essays, Biography and non-fiction prose, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary