18 books like Writing Life Writing

What to read after Writing Life Writing — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Design and truth in autobiography Roy Pascal · 1960 · 202p · ≈ 6h · Moderate Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves… Shares: Autobiographie, Biography & Memoir

Telling Tales Kylie Cardell · 2015 · 156p · ≈ 5h · Moderate Young writers have historically played a pivotal role in shaping autobiographical genres and this continues into the graphic and digital texts which characterise contemporary life writing. This volume offers a selection of pertinent case studies which illuminate some of the core themes which have come to characterise autobiographical writings of childhood, including: cultural and identity… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

Confessions of the Critics H. Aram Veeser · 1995 · 272p · ≈ 9h · Moderate The Confessions of the Critics shatters a certain silence. Autobiographical criticism has until now skated relatively free from the challenges that usually assail a new literary critical method. It has had this immunity from critique largely because feminists and third-world liberation fighters--such as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich and Jane Gallop--ushered it to the North American academic… Shares: Autobiographie, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

Writing for your life Deena Metzger · 1992 · ★ 3.5 · 260p · ≈ 8h · Moderate In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Natalie Goldberg, this resource for writers and non-writers alike shows the act of writing to be a dynamic means of knowing, healing, and creating the body, mind, and spirit. Shares: Authorship, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

Victorian Diary Anne-Marie Millim · 2013 · 226p · ≈ 7h · Moderate In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication… Shares: Autobiographie, Authorship, Biography & Memoir

The prelude William Wordsworth · 1850 · ★ 3.9 · 240p · ≈ 8h · Challenging Selected sonnets and poems with bibliography and chronology of the life of Wordsworth. Shares: Authorship, Literary Criticism

Autobiography Effect Dennis Schep · 2019 · 258p · ≈ 8h · Moderate Since the advent of post-structuralism, various authors have problematized the modern conception of autobiography by questioning the status of authorship and interrogating the relation between language and reality. Yet even after making autobiography into a theoretical problem, many of these authors ended up writing about themselves. This paradox stands at the center of this wide-ranging study of… Shares: Autobiographie, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

Mediating Memory Bunty Avieson · 2017 · 344p · ≈ 11h · Moderate The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

Inscribed Identities Joan Ramon Resina · 2019 · 232p · ≈ 7h · Moderate Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by… Shares: Autobiographie, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

How to write your own life story Lois Daniel · 1980 · 221p · ≈ 7h · Moderate Writing the story of one's life sounds like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. This warmhearted, encouraging guide helps readers record the events of their lives for family and friends. Excerpts from other writers' work are included to exemplify and inspire. Provided are tips on intriguing topics to write about, foolproof tricks to jog your memory, ways to capture stories on paper… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

Bluebeard Kurt Vonnegut · 1987 · ★ 4.2 · 293p · ≈ 9h · Moderate Broad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

An autobiography Anthony Trollope · 1853 · ★ 4.4 · 321p · ≈ 10h · Challenging Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day. Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans… Shares: Autobiographie, Biography & Memoir

Early modern English lives Ronald Bedford · 2007 · 249p · ≈ 8h · Moderate How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals,… Shares: Autobiographie, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

Autobiography and imagination John Pilling · 1981 · 178p · ≈ 5h · Moderate This book looks at the autobiographical work of nine twentieth-century writers – Henry Adams, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Green and Adrian Stokes. The author argues that often the writer has shaped his life through his craft, coming to understand the pattern of his own existence through the formalism of language. In each case the… Shares: Autobiographie, Biography & Memoir

Autoethnography and the Other Tami Spry · 2016 · 216p · ≈ 7h · Moderate Challenging the critique of autoethnography as overly focused on the self, Tami Spry calls for a performative autoethnography that both unsettles the "I" and represents the Other with equal commitment. Expanding on her popular book Body, Paper, Stage, Spry uses a variety of examples, literary forms, and theoretical traditions to reframe this research method as transgressive, liberatory, and… Shares: Autobiographie, Authorship, Biography & Memoir

A million miles in a thousand years Donald Miller · 2009 · ★ 4.2 · 255p · ≈ 8h · Moderate After writing a successful memoir, Donald Miller's life stalled. During what should have been the height of his success, he found himself unwilling to get out of bed, avoiding responsibility, even questioning the meaning of life. But when two movie producers proposed turning his memoir into a movie, he found himself launched into a new story filled with risk, possibility, beauty, and meaning.A… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

Ninety days Bill Clegg · 2012 · ★ 3.3 · 208p · ≈ 6h · Moderate The goal is ninety: just ninety clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction that caused Bill Clegg to lose everything. After seventy-three days in rehab, he returns to New York and attends two or three meetings each day. There, he befriends Asa - seemingly unshakeably sober - and Polly, struggling with her own cycle of recovery and relapse. When Clegg relapses for the first time,… Shares: Authorship, Biography & Memoir

Poetics of Arabic Autobiography Ariel M. Sheetrit · 2020 · 198p · ≈ 6h · Moderate This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the "self"—the "auto" of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although… Shares: Authorship, Literary Criticism, Biography & Memoir

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