literature is life essay

Essay on the connection between literature and life

The connection between literature and life is intimate and vital. Literature is the expression of individual and social life and thought through language. While the subject matter and treatment must be such as are of general human interest, the expression must be emotive; the form must give aesthetic pleasure and satisfaction.

Literature must not be confounded with sociology, philosophy, religion or psychology, though these give substance and depth to literature. It may or may not impart knowledge or religious or moral instruction directly. Its theme may be social problem or political revolution or religious movement; but it may, with equal justification, be an individual’s passion, problem or fantasy. But the object is not so much to teach as to delight.

Books are literature when they bring us into some relation with real life. Herein lies its power and universal appeal. While there are some who take perfection of form to be the chief pre-occupation of literature, many more are inclined to the view that the primary value of literature is its human significance. Literature must be woven out of the stuff of life as its mirror. Its value depends on the depth and breadth of the life that it paints.

It was used to be believed at one time that the deepest things in life are those that deal with what were called the eternal varieties of life. The ideas of God, for example, or of certain moral virtues, were supposed to be eternal. But experience and a wider knowledge of the changing conditions of social life have shaken man’s faith in the unchangeableness of such concepts.

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Ideas change with those condi­tions, which are never static. Thus, peoples have different ideas of the Godhead. There are many who believe in a persona/ God; others worship an all-pervasive Presence in this Universe. The laws of morality, again, undergo changes from country to country and from age to age.

Hence, in modern times, our conception of the depth of literature is not related to this doctrine of eternal truths. We try rather to understand the forces behind these social changes. Therefore with regard to literature, our ideas of its value depends on the extent to which is has been able to express the changing conditions of social life. Great literature always grasps and reflects these truths of life that emerge triumphant out of the ruins of the past.

Literature is great because of its universality. It does not deal with the particular society of a particular community but with society as a whole or in its entirety. For this reason, the literature that appealed to the people through the spoken word had a greater appeal than that which appeals through the written word—which may not reach all men.

The recited epics of Homer, the acted plays of Shakespeare, the chanted songs of Chandidas or the communal reading of Mangala Kavya had a more extended appeal than our modern poets and novelists who express only segments of social life. Poetry that expresses intensely individual views and sentiments, novels that depict the manners of a limited class of community or deal with highly specialised problems, cannot surely be of the same level as are Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas or Kritibas’s Ramayana, which had and still have a mass appeal. This led Aristotle to affirm that the proper subject of poetry is human action.

The restricted appeal of modern literature resulted from the dependence of writers on the patronage of high-born persons. Nec­essarily such writers had to produce work that would appeal to their patrons primarily. As a result, their range became limited; Chaucer was a much richer artist; his insight into life was also profound; but he lacked the spontaneity, the range, the popular appeal of the ballad-writers, that of the ballads of “Mymansingha Gitika”.

Modern writers have developed a flair for expression, feelings and situation that are subtle and complex in language, Wordsworth realized this and advocated that poetry should be the language of common speech, the heightened speech of the rustics. The more literature is free from its class limitations, and becomes the vehicle of the thoughts and feeling of the common man, the working people, the more will it tend to become popular and public.

Literature mast has social functions. Art for art’s sake, pursuit of pure beauty through art, the creation of a literary or artist’s masterpiece as an end in itself—are now falling into disfavor. Great literature must always serve the need of the people. It must voice their inmost desires, their noblest aspirations.

In the second place, by drawing the attention of the people to the emerging truths of life, literature should lead the people forward to a higher plane of life and thought. That is what Walt Whitman meant when he said that the object of literature is “to free, arouse and dilate the human mind”. Literature, in this sense, must emancipate the mind from its limitations; arouse it to a consciousness of the dynamic urge of life.

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How Literature Can Change Your Life

• March 10, 2024

If you’re reading this, you likely already know that literature is amazing. Think back to all the experiences you’ve had curling up with a book, the people you’ve known in these fictional worlds, the places the tales have taken you, the memories you have implanted in your brain all because someone put pen to paper.

Literature is about creating something purely out of words. And in that way, it’s  magic .

But while you can know all this deep down, have you ever really asked yourself the question: how can literature change your life?

For book lovers and writers, the question makes you stop for a second. How can you even  ask  that?

Well, we’re asking. Why? Because taking time to really think about it makes us fall in love all over again with the written word. We won’t cover everything, but let’s look at some of the major ways that literature can change your life.

Reading Makes You More Empathic

It’s true. Reading, and reading  fiction  in particular, makes us better at working out what other people are thinking and feeling. A  2015 study by Diana Tamir  at the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab showed that reading fiction exercises the part of the brain we use to empathize with others.

So in a way, all you beautiful readers out there are gaining ESP with every novel you pick up.

In the complex and multicultural world we live in, empathy is more important than ever. But it’s the core of the human experience, even in the best of times. As long as we are lucky enough to be on earth, we share it with others. Reading literature makes that a joy rather than a burden.

What You Read Is Also About What You Aren’t Reading

Here is one of the newest benefits to reading literature: it keeps us away from other forms of pastimes that are making us more  anxious and depressed . The biggest one is social media, the place where confidence and attention spans go to die.

It can be hard to parse out whether social media causes depression or people who are depressed tend to use social media more. But growing evidence is pointing to the idea that these platforms are hurting our life satisfaction.

Reading not only helps us avoid the dreaded FOMO and endless comparison to others that social media brings, it also helps keep our attention spans.

By not entering into the dopamine-hacking scroll that is your feed, you are protecting your ability to think about the same thing for a prolonged period of time. So yeah, you beautiful readers are also becoming geniuses.

Reading Literature Expands Your Mind

Maybe the most important part of literature is its ability to transport us into the mind of another person. You can pull out your phone and take a video of the room around you, and it will almost perfectly document what the room looks and sounds like right now.

But it won’t tell someone else what it was like for  you  to be in the room.

Literature is a portal into other people. It allows us to break down the doors of our culture, identity, and personal past. It brings us into close connection with others — allowing us to see all the horror, honor, and awe lurking in the human experience.

It shuttles you off into different time periods (even the future!) and places. A library card is free, and it unlocks the ability to expand your mind into the cosmos, hopping around like a mystical being able to inhabit the minds of others. That’s truly psychedelic.

Ultimately, if reading fiction did nothing but engross us in beautiful language and fantastic tales, we’d still do it. But when we recount only a few of the benefits literature provides, it reminds us just how amazing it is we get to read at all.

So what are you waiting for? Get reading!

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1 What Is Literature and Why Do We Study It?

In this book created for my English 211 Literary Analysis introductory course for English literature and creative writing majors at the College of Western Idaho, I’ll introduce several different critical approaches that literary scholars may use to answer these questions.  The critical method we apply to a text can provide us with different perspectives as we learn to interpret a text and appreciate its meaning and beauty.

The existence of literature, however we define it, implies that we study literature. While people have been “studying” literature as long as literature has existed, the formal study of literature as we know it in college English literature courses began in the 1940s with the advent of New Criticism. The New Critics were formalists with a vested interest in defining literature–they were, after all, both creating and teaching about literary works. For them, literary criticism was, in fact, as John Crowe Ransom wrote in his 1942 essay “ Criticism, Inc., ” nothing less than “the business of literature.”

Responding to the concern that the study of literature at the university level was often more concerned with the history and life of the author than with the text itself, Ransom responded, “the students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about literature. But I think this is what the good students have always wanted to do. The wonder is that they have allowed themselves so long to be denied.”

We’ll learn more about New Criticism in Section Three. For now, let’s return to the two questions I posed earlier.

What is literature?

First, what is literature ? I know your high school teacher told you never to look up things on Wikipedia, but for the purposes of literary studies, Wikipedia can actually be an effective resource. You’ll notice that I link to Wikipedia articles occasionally in this book. Here’s how Wikipedia defines literature :

“ Literature  is any collection of  written  work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an  art  form, especially  prose   fiction ,  drama , and  poetry . [1]  In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include  oral literature , much of which has been transcribed. [2] Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.”

This definition is well-suited for our purposes here because throughout this course, we will be considering several types of literary texts in a variety of contexts.

I’m a Classicist—a student of Greece and Rome and everything they touched—so I am always interested in words with Latin roots. The Latin root of our modern word literature  is  litera , or “letter.” Literature, then, is inextricably intertwined with the act of writing. But what kind of writing?

Who decides which texts are “literature”?

The second question is at least as important as the first one. If we agree that literature is somehow special and different from ordinary writing, then who decides which writings count as literature? Are English professors the only people who get to decide? What qualifications and training does someone need to determine whether or not a text is literature? What role do you as the reader play in this decision about a text?

Let’s consider a few examples of things that we would all probably classify as literature. I think we can all (probably) agree that the works of William Shakespeare are literature. We can look at Toni Morrison’s outstanding ouvre of work and conclude, along with the Nobel Prize Committee, that books such as Beloved   and  Song of Solomon   are literature. And if you’re taking a creative writing course and have been assigned the short stories of Raymond Carver or the poems of Joy Harjo , you’re probably convinced that these texts are literature too.

In each of these three cases, a different “deciding” mechanism is at play. First, with Shakespeare, there’s history and tradition. These plays that were written 500 years ago are still performed around the world and taught in high school and college English classes today. It seems we have consensus about the tragedies, histories, comedies, and sonnets of the Bard of Avon (or whoever wrote the plays).

In the second case, if you haven’t heard of Toni Morrison (and I am very sorry if you haven’t), you probably have heard of the Nobel Prize. This is one of the most prestigious awards given in literature, and since she’s a winner, we can safely assume that Toni Morrison’s works are literature.

Finally, your creative writing professor is an expert in their field. You know they have an MFA (and worked hard for it), so when they share their favorite short stories or poems with you, you trust that they are sharing works considered to be literature, even if you haven’t heard of Raymond Carver or Joy Harjo before taking their class.

(Aside: What about fanfiction? Is fanfiction literature?)

We may have to save the debate about fan fiction for another day, though I introduced it because there’s some fascinating and even literary award-winning fan fiction out there.

Returning to our question, what role do we as readers play in deciding whether something is literature? Like John Crowe Ransom quoted above, I think that the definition of literature should depend on more than the opinions of literary critics and literature professors.

I also want to note that contrary to some opinions, plenty of so-called genre fiction can also be classified as literature. The Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has written both science fiction and historical fiction. Iain Banks , the British author of the critically acclaimed novel The Wasp Factory , published popular science fiction novels under the name Iain M. Banks. In other words, genre alone can’t tell us whether something is literature or not.

In this book, I want to give you the tools to decide for yourself. We’ll do this by exploring several different critical approaches that we can take to determine how a text functions and whether it is literature. These lenses can reveal different truths about the text, about our culture, and about ourselves as readers and scholars.

“Turf Wars”: Literary criticism vs. authors

It’s important to keep in mind that literature and literary theory have existed in conversation with each other since Aristotle used Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex to define tragedy. We’ll look at how critical theory and literature complement and disagree with each other throughout this book. For most of literary history, the conversation was largely a friendly one.

But in the twenty-first century, there’s a rising tension between literature and criticism. In his 2016 book Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict, literary scholar Martin Paul Eve argues that twenty-first century authors have developed

a series of novelistic techniques that, whether deliberate or not on the part of the author, function to outmanoeuvre, contain, and determine academic reading practices. This desire to discipline university English through the manipulation and restriction of possible hermeneutic paths is, I contend, a result firstly of the fact that the metafictional paradigm of the high-postmodern era has pitched critical and creative discourses into a type of productive competition with one another. Such tensions and overlaps (or ‘turf wars’) have only increased in light of the ongoing breakdown of coherent theoretical definitions of ‘literature’ as distinct from ‘criticism’ (15).

One of Eve’s points is that by narrowly and rigidly defining the boundaries of literature, university English professors have inadvertently created a situation where the market increasingly defines what “literature” is, despite the protestations of the academy. In other words, the gatekeeper role that literary criticism once played is no longer as important to authors. For example, (almost) no one would call 50 Shades of Grey literature—but the salacious E.L James novel was the bestselling book of the decade from 2010-2019, with more than 35 million copies sold worldwide.

If anyone with a blog can get a six-figure publishing deal , does it still matter that students know how to recognize and analyze literature? I think so, for a few reasons.

• First, the practice of reading critically helps you to become a better reader and writer, which will help you to succeed not only in college English courses but throughout your academic and professional career.
• Second, analysis is a highly sought after and transferable skill. By learning to analyze literature, you’ll practice the same skills you would use to analyze anything important. “Data analyst” is one of the most sought after job positions in the New Economy—and if you can analyze Shakespeare, you can analyze data. Indeed.com’s list of top 10 transferable skills includes analytical skills , which they define as “the traits and abilities that allow you to observe, research and interpret a subject in order to develop complex ideas and solutions.”
• Finally, and for me personally, most importantly, reading and understanding literature makes life make sense. As we read literature, we expand our sense of what is possible for ourselves and for humanity. In the challenges we collectively face today, understanding the world and our place in it will be important for imagining new futures.

A note about using generative artificial intelligence

As I was working on creating this textbook, ChatGPT exploded into academic consciousness. Excited about the possibilities of this new tool, I immediately began incorporating it into my classroom teaching. In this book, I have used ChatGPT to help me with outlining content in chapters. I also used ChatGPT to create sample essays for each critical lens we will study in the course. These essays are dry and rather soulless, but they do a good job of modeling how to apply a specific theory to a literary text. I chose John Donne’s poem “The Canonization” as the text for these essays so that you can see how the different theories illuminate different aspects of the text.

I encourage students in my courses to use ChatGPT in the following ways:

• To generate ideas about an approach to a text.
• To better understand basic concepts.
• To assist with outlining an essay.
• To check grammar, punctuation, spelling, paragraphing, and other grammar/syntax issues.

If you choose to use Chat GPT, please include a brief acknowledgment statement as an appendix to your paper after your Works Cited page explaining how you have used the tool in your work. Here is an example of how to do this from Monash University’s “ Acknowledging the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence .”

I acknowledge the use of [insert AI system(s) and link] to [specific use of generative artificial intelligence]. The prompts used include [list of prompts]. The output from these prompts was used to [explain use].

Here is more information about how to cite the use of generative AI like ChatGPT in your work. The information below was adapted from “Acknowledging and Citing Generative AI in Academic Work” by Liza Long (CC BY 4.0).

The Modern Language Association (MLA) uses a template of core elements to create citations for a Works Cited page. MLA  asks students to apply this approach when citing any type of generative AI in their work. They provide the following guidelines:

Cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it. Acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location. Take care to vet the secondary sources it cites. (MLA)

Here are some examples of how to use and cite generative AI with MLA style:

Example One: Paraphrasing Text

Let’s say that I am trying to generate ideas for a paper on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” I ask ChatGPT to provide me with a summary and identify the story’s main themes. Here’s a  link to the chat . I decide that I will explore the problem of identity and self-expression in my paper.

My Paraphrase of ChatGPT with In-Text Citation

The problem of identity and self expression, especially for nineteenth-century women, is a major theme in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“Summarize the short story”).

Works Cited Entry

“Summarize the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Include a breakdown of the main themes” prompt.  ChatGPT.  24 May Version, OpenAI, 20 Jul. 2023,  https://chat.openai.com/share/d1526b95-920c-48fc-a9be-83cd7dfa4be5 

Example Two: Quoting Text

In the same chat, I continue to ask ChatGPT about the theme of identity and self expression. Here’s an example of how I could quote the response in the body of my paper:

When I asked  ChatGPT  to describe the theme of identity and self expression, it noted that the eponymous yellow wallpaper acts as a symbol of the narrator’s self-repression. However, when prompted to share the scholarly sources that formed the basis of this observation,  ChatGPT  responded, “As an AI language model, I don’t have access to my training data, but I was trained on a mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data. OpenAI, the organization behind my development, has not publicly disclosed the specifics of the individual datasets used, including whether scholarly sources were specifically used” (“Summarize the short story”).

It’s worth noting here that ChatGPT can “ hallucinate ” fake sources. As a Microsoft training manual notes, these chatbots are “built to be persuasive, not truthful” (Weiss &Metz, 2023). The May 24, 2023 version will no longer respond to direct requests for references; however, I was able to get around this restriction fairly easily by asking for “resources” instead.

When I ask for resources to learn more about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” here is one source it recommends:

“Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper: A Symptomatic Reading” by Elaine R. Hedges: This scholarly article delves into the psychological and feminist themes of the story, analyzing the narrator’s experience and the implications of the yellow wallpaper on her mental state. It’s available in the journal “Studies in Short Fiction.” (“Summarize the short story”).

Using Google Scholar, I look up this source to see if it’s real. Unsurprisingly, this source is not a real one, but it does lead me to another (real) source: Kasmer, Lisa. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s’ The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Symptomatic Reading.”  Literature and Psychology  36.3 (1990): 1.

Note: ALWAYS check any sources that ChatGPT or other generative AI tools recommend.

For more information about integrating and citing generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, please see this section of  Write What Matters.

I acknowledge that ChatGPT does not respect the individual rights of authors and artists and ignores concerns over copyright and intellectual property in its training; additionally, I acknowledge that the system was trained in part through the exploitation of precarious workers in the global south. In this work I specifically used ChatGPT to assist with outlining chapters, providing background information about critical lenses, and creating “model” essays for the critical lenses we will learn about together. I have included links to my chats in an appendix to this book.

Critical theories: A targeted approach to writing about literature

Ultimately, there’s not one “right” way to read a text. In this book. we will explore a variety of critical theories that scholars use to analyze literature. The book is organized around different targets that are associated with the approach introduced in each chapter. In the introduction, for example, our target is literature. In future chapters you’ll explore these targeted analysis techniques:

• Author: Biographical Criticism
• Text: New Criticism
• Reader: Reader Response Criticism
• Gap: Deconstruction (Post-Structuralism)
• Context: New Historicism and Cultural Studies
• Power: Marxist and Postcolonial Criticism
• Mind: Psychological Criticism
• Gender: Feminist, Post Feminist, and Queer Theory
• Nature: Ecocriticism

Each chapter will feature the target image with the central approach in the center. You’ll read a brief introduction about the theory, explore some primary texts (both critical and literary), watch a video, and apply the theory to a primary text. Each one of these theories could be the subject of its own entire course, so keep in mind that our goal in this book is to introduce these theories and give you a basic familiarity with these tools for literary analysis. For more information and practice, I recommend Steven Lynn’s excellent Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory , which provides a similar introductory framework.

I am so excited to share these tools with you and see you grow as a literary scholar. As we explore each of these critical worlds, you’ll likely find that some critical theories feel more natural or logical to you than others. I find myself much more comfortable with deconstruction than with psychological criticism, for example. Pay attention to how these theories work for you because this will help you to expand your approaches to texts and prepare you for more advanced courses in literature.

P.S. If you want to know what my favorite book is, I usually tell people it’s Herman Melville’s Moby Dick . And I do love that book! But I really have no idea what my “favorite” book of all time is, let alone what my favorite book was last year. Every new book that I read is a window into another world and a template for me to make sense out of my own experience and better empathize with others. That’s why I love literature. I hope you’ll love this experience too.

writings in prose or verse, especially :  writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest (Merriam Webster)

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essays About Literature: Top 6 Examples and 8 Prompts

Society and culture are formed around literature. If you are writing essays about literature, you can use the essay examples and prompts featured in our guide.

It has been said that language holds the key to all human activities, and literature is the expression of language. It teaches new words and phrases, allows us to better our communication skills, and helps us learn more about ourselves.

Whether you are reading poems or novels, we often see parts of ourselves in the characters and themes presented by the authors. Literature gives us ideas and helps us determine what to say, while language gives form and structure to our ideas, helping us convey them.

6 Helpful Essay Examples

1. importance of literature by william anderson, 2. philippine literature by jean hodges, 3. african literature by morris marshall.

• 4.  Nine Questions From Children’s Literature That Every Person Should Answer by Shaunta Grimes

5. Exploring tyranny and power in Macbeth by Tom Davey

6. guide to the classics: homer’s odyssey by jo adetunji, 1. the importance of literature, 2. comparing and contrasting two works of literature  , 3. the use of literary devices, 4. popular adaptations of literature, 5. gender roles in literature, 6. analysis of your chosen literary work, 7. fiction vs. non-fiction, 8. literature as an art form.

“Life before literature was practical and predictable, but in the present-day, literature has expanded into countless libraries and into the minds of many as the gateway for comprehension and curiosity of the human mind and the world around them. Literature is of great importance and is studied upon as it provides the ability to connect human relationships and define what is right and what is wrong.”

Anderson writes about why an understanding of literature is crucial. It allows us to see different perspectives of people from different periods, countries, and cultures: we are given the ability to see the world from an entirely new lens. As a result, we obtain a better judgment of situations. In a world where anything can happen, literature gives us the key to enacting change for ourselves and others. You might also be interested in these essays about Beowulf .

“So successful were the efforts of colonists to blot out the memory of the country’s largely oral past that present-day Filipino writers, artists and journalists are trying to correct this inequity by recognizing the country’s wealth of ethnic traditions and disseminating them in schools through mass media. The rise of nationalistic pride in the 1960s and 1970s also helped bring about this change of attitude among a new breed of Filipinos concerned about the “Filipino identity.””

In her essay, Hodges writes about the history of Philippine literature. Unfortunately, much of Philippine literary history has been obscured by Spanish colonization, as the written works of the Spanish largely replaced the oral tradition of the native Filipinos. A heightened sense of nationalism has recently led to a resurgence in Filipino tradition, including ancient Philippine literature. 

“In fact, the common denominator of the cultures of the African continent is undoubtedly the oral tradition. Writing on black Africa started in the middle Ages with the introduction of the Arabic language and later, in the nineteenth century with introduction of the Latin alphabet. Since 1934, with the birth of the “Negritude.” African authors began to write in French or in English.”

Marshall explores the history of African literature, particularly the languages it was written over time. It was initially written in Arabic and native languages; however, with the “Negritude” movement, writers began composing their works in French or English. This movement allowed African writers to spread their work and gain notoriety. Marshall gives examples of African literature, shedding light on their lyrical content. 

4.   Nine Questions From Children’s Literature That Every Person Should Answer by Shaunta Grimes

“ They asked me questions — questions about who I am, what I value, and where I’m headed — and pushed me to think about the answers. At some point in our lives, we decide we know everything we need to know. We stop asking questions. To remember what’s important, it sometimes helps to return to that place of childlike curiosity and wonder.”

Grimes’ essay is a testament to how much we can learn from literature, even as simple as children’s stories. She explains how different works of children’s literature, such as Charlotte’s Web and Little Women, can inspire us, help us maximize our imagination, and remind us of the fleeting nature of life. Most importantly, however, they remind us that the future is uncertain, and maximizing it is up to us. 

“This is a world where the moral bar has been lowered; a world which ‘sinks beneath the yoke’. In the Macbeths, we see just how terribly the human soul can be corrupted. However, this struggle is played out within other characters too. Perhaps we’re left wondering: in such a dog-eat-dog world, how would we fare?”

The corruption that power can lead to is genuine; Davey explains how this theme is present in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Even after being honored, Macbeth still wishes to be king and commits heinous acts of violence to achieve his goals. Violence is prevalent throughout the play, but Macbeth and Lady Macbeth exemplify the vicious cycle of bloodshed through their ambition and power. 

“Polyphemus is blinded but survives the attack and curses the voyage home of the Ithacans. All of Odysseus’s men are eventually killed, and he alone survives his return home, mostly because of his versatility and cleverness. There is a strong element of the trickster figure about Homer’s Odysseus.”

Adetunji also exposes a notable work of literature, in this case, Homer’s Odyssey . She goes over the epic poem and its historical context and discusses Odysseus’ most important traits: cleverness and courage. As the story progresses, he displays great courage and bravery in his exploits, using his cunning and wit to outsmart his foes. Finally, Adetunji references modern interpretations of the Odyssey in film, literature, and other media.

8 Prompts for Essays About Literature

In your essay, write about the importance of literature; explain why we need to study literature and how it can help us in the future. Then, give examples of literary works that teach important moral lessons as evidence. 

For your essay, choose two works of literature with similar themes. Then, discuss their similarities and differences in plot, theme, and characters. For example, these themes could include death, grief, love and hate, or relationships. You can also discuss which of the two pieces of literature presents your chosen theme better. 

Writers use literary devices to enhance their literary works and emphasize important points. Literary devices include personification, similes, metaphors, and more. You can write about the effectiveness of literary devices and the reasoning behind their usage. Research and give examples of instances where authors use literary devices effectively to enhance their message.  

Literature has been adapted into cinema, television, and other media time and again, with series such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter turning into blockbuster franchises. Explore how these adaptations diverge from their source material yet retain the key themes the writer composed the work with in mind. If this seems confusing, research first and read some essay examples. 

Literature reflects the ideas of the period it is from; for example, ancient Greek literature, such as Antigone, depicts the ideal woman as largely obedient and subservient, to an extent. For your essay, you can write about how gender roles have evolved in literature throughout the years, specifically about women. Be sure to give examples to support your points. 

Choose a work of literature that interests you and analyze it in your essay. You can use your favorite novel, book, or screenplay, explain the key themes and characters and summarize the plot. Analyze the key messages in your chosen piece of literature, and discuss how the themes are enhanced through the author’s writing techniques.

Literature can be divided into two categories: fiction, from the writer’s imagination, and non-fiction, written about actual events. Explore their similarities and differences, and give your opinion on which is better. For a strong argument, provide ample supporting details and cite credible sources.  

Literature is an art form that uses language, so do you believe it is more effective in conveying its message? Write about how literature compares to other art forms such as painting and sculpture; state your argument and defend it adequately. 

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

For help picking your next essay topic, check out the best essay topics about social media .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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• Importance of Literature: Essay

Literature is the foundation of life . It places an emphasis on many topics from human tragedies to tales of the ever-popular search for love. While it is physically written in words, these words come alive in the imagination of the mind, and its ability to comprehend the complexity or simplicity of the text.

Literature enables people to see through the lenses of others, and sometimes even inanimate objects; therefore, it becomes a looking glass into the world as others view it. It is a journey that is inscribed in pages and powered by the imagination of the reader.

Ultimately, literature has provided a gateway to teach the reader about life experiences from even the saddest stories to the most joyful ones that will touch their hearts.

From a very young age, many are exposed to literature in the most stripped-down form: picture books and simple texts that are mainly for the sole purpose of teaching the alphabet etc. Although these are not nearly as complex as an 800-page sci-fi novel, it is the first step that many take towards the literary world.

Progressively, as people grow older, they explore other genres of books, ones that propel them towards curiosity of the subject, and the overall book.

Reading and being given the keys to the literature world prepares individuals from an early age to discover the true importance of literature: being able to comprehend and understand situations from many perspectives.

Physically speaking, it is impossible to be someone else. It is impossible to switch bodies with another human being, and it is impossible to completely understand the complexity of their world. Literature, as an alternative, is the closest thing the world has to being able to understand another person whole-heartedly.

For stance, a novel about a treacherous war, written from the perspective of a soldier, allows the reader to envision their memories, their pain, and their emotions without actually being that person. Consequently, literature can act as a time machine, enabling individuals to go into a specific time period of the story, into the mind and soul of the protagonist.

With the ability to see the world with a pair of fresh eyes, it triggers the reader to reflect upon their own lives. Reading material that is relatable to the reader may teach them morals and encourage them to practice good judgment.

This can be proven through public school systems, where the books that are emphasized the most tend to have a moral-teaching purpose behind the story.

An example would be William Shakespeare’s stories, where each one is meant to be reflective of human nature – both the good and bad.

Consequently, this can promote better judgment of situations , so the reader does not find themselves in the same circumstances as perhaps those in the fiction world. Henceforth, literature is proven to not only be reflective of life, but it can also be used as a guide for the reader to follow and practice good judgment.

The world today is ever-changing. Never before has life been so chaotic and challenging for all. Life before literature was practical and predictable, but in the present-day, literature has expanded into countless libraries and into the minds of many as the gateway for comprehension and curiosity of the human mind and the world around them.

Literature is of great importance and is studied upon as it provides the ability to connect human relationships and define what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, words are alive more than ever before.

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Author:  William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

Tutor and Freelance Writer. Science Teacher and Lover of Essays. Article last reviewed: 2022 | St. Rosemary Institution © 2010-2024 | Creative Commons 4.0

17 Comments

Indeed literature is the foundation of life, people should know and appreciate these kind of things

its very useful info thanks

very helpful…..tnx

Hi, thanks!

First year student who wants to know about literature and how I can develop interest in reading novels.

Fantastic piece!

wonderful work

Literature is anything that is artistically presented through writtings or orally.

you may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, richer than i you could never be, i know someone who told stories to me.

there’s a great saying that “the universe isn’t made up of at atoms, its made of stories” i hope none will argue this point, because this is the truest thing i have ever heard and its beautiful…….

I have learnt alot thanks to the topic literature.Literature is everything.It answers the questions why?,how? and what?.To me its my best and I will always treasure and embress literature to death.

I agree with the writer when says that Literature is the foundation of life. For me, reading is the most wonderful experience in life. It allows me to travel to other places and other times. I think that also has learnt me to emphathize with others, and see the world with other´s eyes and from their perspectives. I really like to read.

This is the first time i am presenting on a literature and i am surprised by the amount of people who are interested on the same subject. I regret my absence because i have missed much marvelous thing in that field.In fact literature is what is needed by the whole world,it brings the people of different culture together and by doing so it breaks the imposed barriers that divided people.My address now goes to the people of nowadays who prefer other source of entertainment like TV,i am not saying that TV is bad but reading is better of.COME BACK TO IT THEN.

literature is a mirror; a true reflection of our nature. it helps us see ourselves in a third persons point of view of first persons point of view. it instills virtues and condones vices. literature forms a great portion of fun and entertainment through plays, comedies and novels. it also educates individuals on life’s basic but delicate and sacred issues like love and death. it informs us of the many happenings and events that we would never have otherwise known about. literature also forms a source of livelihood to thousands of people, starting from writers,characters in plays, editors, printers,distributors and business people who deal with printed materials. literature is us and without it, we are void.

I believe that life without Literature would be unacceptable , with it i respect myself and loved human life . Next week i am going to make presentation about Literature, so i benefited from this essay.

Thanks a lot

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• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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Life writing.

• Craig Howes Craig Howes Department of English and Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1146
• Published online: 27 October 2020

Since 1990, “life writing” has become a frequently used covering term for the familiar genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, and many other forms of life narrative. Initially adopted as a critical intervention informed by post-structuralist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and especially feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the term also refers to the study of life representation beyond the traditional literary and historical focus on verbal texts, encompassing not only other media—film, graphic narratives, online technologies, performance—but also research in other disciplines—psychology, anthropology, ethnic and Indigenous studies, political science, sociology, education, medicine, and any other field that records, observes, or evaluates lives.

While many critics and theorists still place their work within the realms of autobiography or biography, and others find life writing as a discipline either too ideologically driven, or still too confining conceptually, there is no question that life representation, primarily through narrative, is an important consideration for scholars engaged in virtually any field dealing with the nature and actions of human beings, or anything that lives.

• autobiography
• autofiction
• life narrative

As Julie Rak noted in 2018 , Marlene Kadar’s essay “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—from Genre to Critical Practice,” although written in 1992 , still offers a useful account of life writing’s history as a term, and is still a timely reminder to examine constantly the often-buried theoretical assumptions defining and confining it. After noting that because “life writing” was in use before “biography” or “autobiography,” it “has always been the more inclusive term,” Kadar supplies a taxonomy in the form of a progressive history. Until the 1970s, “life writing” referred to “a particular branch of textual criticism” that subjected some biographies and autobiographies, and a scattering of letters and diaries, to the same literary-critical scrutiny commonly focused upon poetry, drama, or fiction. Kadar cites Donald J. Winslow’s Life-Writing as a locus for this understanding. 1 The problem lurking here is what Kadar elsewhere refers to as “the New Critical wolf”: theoretical assumptions that are “androcentric” and privilege notions of “objective truth and narrative regularity.” Clearly wanting to label this as residual, she turns to the then-current “more broadened version” of life writing. Its champions are primarily, though not exclusively, feminist literary critics devoted to “the proliferation, authorization, and recuperation” of autobiographical texts written by “literary,” but also “ordinary,” men and women. While the “ordinary” allows “personal narratives, oral narratives and life testimonies” and even “anthropological life histories” to enter the realm of life writing, this now-dominant understanding is nevertheless problematic, because it still tends to uncritically draw such binary distinctions as fiction/autobiography, literary/non-literary non-fiction, and even male/female. Heavily influenced by postmoderism, Kadar proposes a third, emergent vision of life writing that moves beyond a desire for fixity and canonization—“with laws and law-making”—by embracing a dynamic, constantly questioning methodology: “From Genre to Critical Practice.” 2

This approach gestures toward a focus upon intersectionality in “unofficial” writing—Kadar’s example is Frederick Douglass—and toward an expansive yet politically engaged life-writing practice that can “appreciate the canon, revise it where it sees fit, and forget it where it also sees fit.” 3 The same approach should be adopted toward such terms as “the autobiographical” or “life writing itself.” After describing life writing “as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narration to the most fictive,” she offers her own “working definition.” Life-writing texts “are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else”—note how biography has at best been relegated to the fringes of the realm—and “who also does not pretend to be absent from the [black, brown, or white] text himself/herself.” Neither an archive nor a taxonomy of texts, life writing employs “an imperfect and always evolving hermeneutic,” where “classical, traditional, or postmodern” approaches coexist, rather than always being set against each other. 4

Kadar’s early-1990s assessment and prophecy will serve here as loose organizational principles for describing how the move “from Genre to Critical Practice” in the ensuing years has proved to be an astonishing, though contested, unfolding of life writing as a term encompassing more initiatives by diverse communities in many locations and media that even the far-sighted Marlene Kadar could have anticipated. Even so, her insistence that life-writing critics and theorists must continue to “resist and reverse the literary and political consequences” produced by impulses toward “ʻdepersonalization’ and unrelenting ʻabstraction’” still stands. 5

From Biography to Autobiography to Life Writing

Kadar’s support for life writing as the umbrella term came in the wake of an energetic focus on autobiography as the most critically and theoretically stimulating life-narrative genre. The academic journal Biography had begun appearing in 1978 , but for all its claims to be An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , it was assumed to be largely devoted to traditional biography criticism and theory. In 1980 , James Olney noted the “shift of attention from bios to autos —from the life to the self,” which he credited with “opening things up and turning them in a philosophical, psychological and literary direction.” 6 Biography scholars would have begged to differ. Discussions of psychology, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis, and of the aesthetics of literary biography, with special attention paid to affinities with the novel, had been part of biography’s critical and theoretical environment for a century. 7 Olney however was not just arguing for autobiography’s legitimacy, but for the primacy of autos within literature itself—a key claim of his landmark monograph Metaphors of Self . 8 Olney was a convener as well as a critic and theorist. Ricia Chansky identifies the “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” Olney held in 1985 as “the moment when contemporary auto/biography studies emerged as a formal discipline within the academy”—not least because it led to the creation of a newsletter that soon became the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies . Although the slashes in the title—credited to Timothy Dow Adams—suggested that a/b would not privilege “self-life writing over life writing,” the variety and sheer number of critical and theoretical works devoted to autobiography in the ensuing years made it clear that for many, it was the more interesting genre. 9

Institutionalization and professional assertion soon followed. Sidonie Smith recalls “those heady days” of creating archives and bibliographies, but also of “writing against the grain, writing counterhistories, writing beyond conventional plots and tropes.” 10 As Olney had predicted, autobiography became a flash point for critical and theoretical writing in women’s studies—a trend heavily influencing Kadar’s thoughts on life writing, and canonized in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader , whose introduction is still the most detailed account of how women critics and theorists from the 1970s to the late 1990s drew upon the most compelling feminist, post-structuralist, cultural, and political writing in their encounters with autobiographical texts. 11

This interest in autobiography—with or without the slash—produced an entire generation of influential writers. Because of their general eminence, Paul de Man’s and Roland Barthes’s comments on and experiments with autobiography were closely examined, but other theorists made autobiography their central attention. 12 Philippe Lejeune’s profoundly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact” complemented Olney’s book on metaphors of self, and so did Paul John Eakin’s volumes Fictions of Autobiography and Touching the World as arguments for the genre’s legitimacy within literary studies. 13 A host of important books, collections, and anthologies soon followed, many with a strongly feminist approach. Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography was an important intervention into literary aesthetics, and Smith and Watson’s edited collection De/Colonizing the Subject forged important links between autobiography and feminist and postcolonial theory. 14 Many other feminist critics and theorists in Europe and North America in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s directed their attention as writers and editors to autobiography, among them collection editors Shari Benstock and Bella Brodsky and Celeste Schenk; monograph writers Elizabeth Bruss, Leigh Gilmore, Caroline Heilbrun, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, and Liz Stanley; and essayists Susan Stanford Friedman and Mary G. Mason. Following in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own , other feminist literary and cultural historians sought out forgotten or yet-to-be-discovered women autobiographers—Patricia Meyer Spacks for the 18th century ; Mary Jean Corbett, Regenia Gagnier, Linda H. Peterson, and Valerie Sanders for the long 19th century ; Estelle C. Jelinek from the time of antiquity; and collection editor Domna C. Stanton from the medieval period to the 20th century . 15

Often viewed through the lens of literary and cultural theory, autobiography therefore became the most-discussed life-writing genre in the 1980s, and has largely remained so ever since. But from the time of Kadar’s Essays on Life Writing , the term “life writing” became increasingly employed as the umbrella term for representing the lives of others, or of one’s self. The key intervention here was Margaretta Jolly’s landmark two-volume Encyclopedia of Life Writing . Published in 2001 , the title term encompasses Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , and through her contributors, Jolly accounts in 1,090 large double-column pages not just for the genres that could be considered life writing, but for life-writing practices in a host of world regions and historical periods. She emphasizes her subject’s interdisciplinary nature. Although the “writing of lives is an ancient and ubiquitous practice,” and the term “life writing” can in England be traced back to the late 17th or early 18th century , it has only gained “wide academic acceptance since the 1980s.” While noting that “the study of autobiography is the most-long-standing and sophisticated branch of analysis in the field”—a claim that biography scholars would dispute, at least with regard to duration—Jolly grants Kadar’s wish to expand beyond the literary by including entries grounded in “anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, theology, cultural studies, and even the biological sciences,” and in forms of life narrative “outside of the written form, including testimony, artifacts, reminiscence, personal narrative, visual arts, photography, film, oral history, and so forth.” 16

The Encyclopedia also provides “international and historical perspective through accounts of life writing traditions and trends from around the world, from Classical times to the present,” and covers “popular and everyday genres and contexts—from celebrity and royal biography to working-class autobiography, letter writing, interviews, and gossip”—a continuation of work, epitomized by Smith and Watson’s Getting a Life , that pays close attention to how “ordinary” lives are produced in a variety of public and institutional settings. 17 Like Kadar, Jolly notes the “crucial influence” of “Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, African-American, and Post-Colonial Studies” upon autobiography studies’ emergence in the 1980s, and she also observes that many contributors use the term “auto/biography” to point toward a more capacious sense of the field. But also like Kadar, in an “effort to balance the emphasis on autobiography,” Jolly chooses “life writing” as her preferred term, because it can more easily accommodate “many aspects of this wide-ranging field, not to mention regions of the world, where life-writing scholarship remains in its infancy, or has yet to emerge.” 18 This ambitious and expansive reference work anticipates most of the ensuing developments in life writing.

In the same year appeared the first edition of Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography . Although retaining autobiography as the covering term—describing it as “a particular generic practice” that “became definitive for life writing in the West”—they share Jolly’s commitment to generic, historic, and geographical inclusivity, and take a highly detailed approach to clarifying terminology. 19 Echoing Kadar, they note that autobiography “has been vigorously challenged in the wake of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment subject”—an entity whose “politics is one of exclusion.” In response, they grant that “life writing” is a more expansive term, because it can refer to “writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject,” whether “biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential.” But, always sensitive to new developments and dimensions, Smith and Watson suggest that “life narrative” is even more capacious, because it refers to “autobiographical [and presumably biographical] acts of any sort.” 20 With the added perspective of nine years, and then eighteen years for their second edition, Smith and Watson update Kadar’s 1992 account of the profound impact that feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theory have had upon life writing—although they still direct readers to their own Women, Autobiography, Theory for a more detailed “overview of representative theories and work up to the late 1990s.” 21 Their main point is that the theoretical work Kadar called for has been taking place: “the challenges posed by postmodernism’s deconstruction of any solid ground of selfhood and truth outside of discourse,” when coupled with “postcolonial theory’s troubling of established hierarchies of authority, tradition, and influence,” led life-writing critics and theorists to examine “generic instability, regimes of truth telling, referentiality, relationality, and embodiment,” which not only undermined “the earlier critical period’s understanding of canonical autobiography” but also “expanded the range of life writing and the kinds of stories critics may engage in rethinking the field of life narrative.” 22

An efficient two-page synopsis identifies the specific theoretical stimuli for this critical scrutiny. Lacanian psychoanalysis undercut the notion of the autonomous self, replacing it with a “split subject always constituted in language.” Derridean différance offers the insight that in life writing, as in all writing, “meaning is always in process, continuously put off, or deferred.” With Jean François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida also deconstructs the supposed boundaries between Truth and fiction, actually set by supposed “ʻmaster’” narratives. Louis Althusser’s linking of socioeconomic relations to subjectivity offers life-writing scholars interpolation as a concept for understanding life-narrative construction. Michel Foucault’s claim that discourse is an exercise of power tied to the construction of identity is also formative, and so is Bakhtinian heteroglossia as the counter to the fantasy of the unitary “I.” Feminist theory directs life-writing scholars’ attention to the relationship between the political and the personal, to the “cultural inscription and practices of embodiment,” and to the dangers inherent in universalized notions of “woman.” Frantz Fanon’s work on the colonial gaze foregrounds domination’s and subordination’s roles in the constitution of subjectivity, which postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist theorists all see as crucial for recognizing the minoritizing of subjectivity, and then decolonizing such constructions. Gay and queer studies reveal the performative nature of subjectivity, and undermine binary models of gender and sexuality. Cultural studies’ interest in “popular, public, and everyday forms of textuality, including everyday practices of self-narrating in verbal, visual, and mixed modes,” extends the range of life narratives that can be examined, and neurological studies offer insight into the brain’s material effects on memory, and into trauma’s impact on perceived identity. 23

In “Expanding Autobiography Studies,” the final chapter of their two-part critical history of the field, Smith and Watson list the important critical and theoretical initiatives of previous decades. Performativity, positionality, and relationality are presented as “Useful Theoretical Concepts.” Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter and Smith’s own Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body are cited as formative texts for recognizing that the self customarily thought of as “prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling.” 24 Paul John Eakin and Nancy K. Miller are credited with expanding the applicability of relationality beyond feminist theory and women’s autobiography and arriving at a virtually universal applicability for life writing. 25 The most important concept for contemporary life writing, however, is arguably positionality, because it helps critics and theorists evaluate how “culturally salient” subject positions, “always multiple and often contradictory,” find ways to tell their stories “at a particular historical moment.” Formed “at the intersections of multiple discursive trajectories,” certain life narratives insist on the significance of subjects who are dealing with “de/colonization, immigration, displacement, and exile.” Such narratives demand the critical use of such terms as “ hybrid, border, diasporic, mestiza, nomadic, migratory, minoritized ”; they also force theorists to consider the natures and purposes of Indigenous life writing. 26

Despite this emphasis on life writing as referential, registering changes in practice still tends to involve identifying and tracking what Smith and Watson call “Emergent Genres of Life Narrative.” 27 Their second edition ( 2010 ) foregrounds trauma narratives, disability life writing, and human rights narratives and testimonio ; life writing appearing from a much wider range of locations, organized under the title “Critical Geographies”; narratives that foreground developments in neuroscience, memory, and genetics; the myriad of life representations arising out of the turbulent realm of “Digitalized Forms and Identities”; the templates or familiar genres deployed for recording “Everyday Lives”; and, more generally, autocritical scholarship, which requires critics or theorists to position themselves in relation to the narratives they choose to record or study and, in some cases, to recognize the necessity of being a part or a member of the group or population whose life stories are at issue.

Smith and Watson end their anatomy and history of autobiography by noting that the many “contesting approaches” to life writing are also adding many formerly “marginal” forms to “the canon of autobiography.” In the 2010 edition, Appendix A offers definitions for “Sixty Genres of Life Narrative,” up from the fifty-two provided in the first edition. But Smith and Watson “conclude” that increases in the number of relevant texts and presenting media will lead to major shifts in critical and theoretical debates, even though at bottom, a life narrative is always “a rhetorical act embedded in the history of specific communities.” 28

Backlash, Boomlash, and Boom Echo

Raymond Williams and Marlene Kadar would both acknowledge that treating ideologies or forms of life writing as residual, dominant, or emergent, and therefore capable of being mapped onto a historical or progressive continuum, can neither assume the disappearance of earlier stages, nor prevent resurgences and unpredictable alliances. 29 Take for example the history of critical debates since the late 20th century about the relationship between biography and life writing. The focus on autobiography as the central concern for critics has often been explicit: Marlene Kadar’s 1992 provisional definition of life writing ruled out authors who “continuously write about someone else.” 30 In response, many biographers and some theorists have insisted on biography’s continuing significance, and even centrality. Everyone involved tends to agree that biography was once dominant, but is now either residual, or treated as such. But in the 21st century highly unlikely allies have been calling for a “Biographical Turn,” which for some means re-evaluating what it means to tell another’s life in different historical and cultural contexts, and for others actually means a “Return” to pre-eminence—emergent and residual, yet united in asserting biography’s value. 31

Insisting that biography’s strongest affinities lie with history, and not literature or cultural studies, Hans Renders has arguably been the most visible defender of biography against the onslaught of life writing, which he considers a “shift” into an “ideology” emerging from “comparative literature and gender and cultural studies.” According to Renders, life-writing critics and theorists present autobiographers, and sometimes themselves, as “victimized by social context” and therefore, in Michael Holroyd’s words, seeking “retrospective justice.” 32 The biographer or biography theorist respects the “scholarly imperative to analyze the world (including the past) as objectively as possible”—not “to correct injustice,” but to “understand it better.” Conversely, those who study life writing seem preoccupied with “battered and raped women,” “Mothering Narratives,” “ʻJewish Women and Comics,’” “homosexuals,” and self-proclaimed victims of “climate change” or “racism, and social exclusion.” 33 The emphasis on gender here can be read as a response to the profound impact of feminist theory on autobiography and life-writing studies, and the gestures to race and class as resistance to the tenor of emergent life-narrative scholarship.

What must also be accounted for is the sustained production of biography by trade and university publishers. Throughout the memoir boom that so many theorists, critics, and reviewers have declared, highly conventional single-volume biographies have appeared regularly, speaking to the continued public interest in what Hans Renders calls “the biographical tradition, based on individuals like Hitler or Einstein, but also less famous persons.” 34 The indisputable success of The Biographer’s Craft newsletter ( 2008 –) and the creation of the Biographers International Organization (BIO; 2010 –), with its hugely popular annual conferences, counter biography’s residual status in much life-writing criticism and theory with its continued prominence in the public sphere. And arguably, most BIO members prefer it that way. Like many poets, playwrights, and novelists, biographers are often wary of critics and theorists of literature, preferring at their conferences to discuss publishing possibilities, or to receive advice on research and writing, rather than engage in theoretical or critical analysis of biography as a genre. 35

But of course, life-writing scholars are also interested in production, with Julie Rak as the most prominent cultural historian and theorist who insists that publication and distribution are salient, and even essential, subjects of study. Although primarily concerned with autobiography, her 2013 book Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market focuses on books “written, published, sold in bookstores and circulated by public libraries for people like my grandmother.” Rak presents non-fiction “as part of a production cycle” of “commodities that are manufactured for a market by an industry,” paying close attention to the mechanics of publication, distribution, classification for purposes of sales, and advertising for books “produced by mainstream presses for large audiences”—a critical interest that she paved the way for by editing a special issue on popular auto/biography for the Canadian Review of American Studies . 36 The affordances and filters that particular models of production impose upon life narratives are technological correlatives to the ideologically informed reception that certain kinds of life writing and testimony encounter when they venture into the world. Most notably, in Tainted Witness , Leigh Gilmore evaluates how women’s life narratives arouse powerful, at times hysterical, and even violent constraints upon what they are allowed to say about life conditions, or about the actions of others—and especially powerful men. 37 Though genres and chosen media may range from published memoirs or testimonio , to congressional hearings, to court trials, to social media venues and campaigns, the dynamics are the same. Women’s life-writing narratives threaten to disrupt or damage a man’s supposed life script by adding to it details of abuse, or cruelty, or criminality. It would be hard to imagine a more vivid example of what Hans Renders objects to in life writing, but the social and political significance of such narratives also explains why they could never easily be relegated to a marginal subgenre of biography. In fact, the power dynamics in Renders’s paradigm between male-centered “objective” biography and female-produced “victim” life writing mirror those in the scenarios that Gilmore evaluates.

The rest of this article maps out the most notable developments in life-narrative scholarship since the late 20th century , drawing principally on the “Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing,” an annotated list of books, edited collections and special issues, individual articles, and dissertations that appears in Biography : An Interdisciplinary Quarterly . The sample contains roughly 21,000 entries; the discussion here will concentrate on books, edited collections, and special issues because they represent formidable and sustained studies of some aspect of the field, or point to a community of scholars engaged in similar work. While essentially tracing out Kadar’s three-stage progressive account of life writing, this article will also provide examples of critical and theoretical practice to elaborate on the expansions, revisions, departures, and interventions that the practice of life-writing and life-narrative scholarship has produced. The discussion concludes by identifying a few ideas that might offer new directions or understandings for those interested in how lives are represented.

Biography Studies Sustained—Residual as Dominant and Emergent

For a genre supposedly lapsing into subordinate status or irrelevance, biography continues to attract a great deal of critical and theoretical attention. Though usually retracing that familiar Western trajectory running from Rome through to contemporary trade publications, historical or thematic overviews, often written by well-known biographers, appear regularly. Some are reader-friendly primers, such as Nigel Hamilton’s Brief History , Hermione Lee’s Very Short Introduction , and Andrew Brown’s Brief History of Biography: From Plutarch to Celebs , all of which appeared in the early 21st century . More “weighty” accounts include Catherine N. Parke’s Biography: Writing Lives and Paula R. Backscheider’s Reflections , both published in the 1990s. 38 Before any of these histories, however, came Carl Rollyson’s Biography: An Annotated Bibliography ( 1992 ), which organized and annotated the critical literature in English. Arguably the most prolific writer on biography theory and criticism, Rollyson has published many biographies—political, literary, and cinematic—and several guides and essay collections about theory and practice. 39 Biography: A User’s Guide , for instance, discusses keywords alphabetically; Hans Renders and Nigel Hamilton adopt a similar format for The ABC of Modern Biography . 40 A popular sub-genre comprises books for would-be biographers written by famous practitioners. Extending back to Leon Edel, more recent examples include Michael Holroyd’s Works on Paper , Carl Rollyson’s Confessions of a Serial Biographer , and Nigel Hamilton’s How to Do Biography —a companion volume to his Brief History . 41

Literary lives appear prominently in all of these works, and many texts take them as their subject. John Batchelor’s The Art of Literary Biography and Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley’s Writing the Lives of Writers are edited collections arising out of conferences in the 1990s; more recently, Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard have edited Les nouvelles écritures biographiques , and Richard Bradford has overseen a substantial Companion to Literary Biography . 42 Individual monographs include Michael Benton’s Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography , and Rana Tekcan’s Too Far for Comfort . And even though she has reservations about focusing on female writers, Alison Booth’s How to Make It as a Woman is a detailed and insightful study of literary biography in the 19th and 20th centuries . 43

Despite literary biography’s apparently privileged status, historians have also explored biography’s significance to their field. Barbara Caine’s Biography and History was followed by two edited collections from the Netherlands: Hans Renders and Binne de Haan’s Theoretical Discussions of Biography ; and Renders, de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma’s The Biographical Turn . Both volumes argue for biography as a historical genre that does not share life writing’s preoccupations with race, class, and gender. That the distinction is significant is also suggested by the title of Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds’s “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing” for disclosure . 44 German historians have also displayed a strong interest in biography, in edited clusters such as Atiba Pertilla’s and Uwe Spiekermann’s “The Challenge of Biography,” or Sarah Panter’s Mobility and Biography . 45

Monographs and collections have delineated specific periods and locations for study. Thomas Hägg’s The Art of Biography in Antiquity has some affinities with the Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis; with Sharpe and Zwicker’s edited collection on early modern England; and with Mombert and Rosellini’s edited volume Usages des vies . Juliette Atkinson’s Victorian Biography Reconsidered is an astute and suggestive study of England’s intense preoccupation with various forms of the genre. 46 And while such works tend to confine themselves to Western Europe—Great Britain, France, and Germany/Austria—or the United States, collections have focused on other regions, among them Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries. 47

Despite the longstanding suspicion of considering biography through the lens of contemporary theory, a substantial number of such works have appeared since c. 2005 , many from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Wilhelm Hemecker, its director, has edited or co-edited several volumes; among them is the remarkable Theorie der Biographie , co-edited with Bernhard Fetz, which contains excerpts from famous authors and theorists with special relevance for biography—Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, William Dilthey, Sigfried Kracauer, Michel Foucault, the Vienna psychoanalysts—paired with commentaries by contemporary biography scholars. Fetz also edited Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie , which appeared in 2009 . 48 More than a decade earlier, a similar overview was provided by Biographical Creation / La création biographique , an English/French volume edited by Marta Dvorak. 49 Monographs taking a sustained theoretical approach to biography are relatively rare. Two of the most notable are Susan Tridgell’s Understanding Our Selves and Caitríona Ní Dhúill’s Metabiography , an impressive overview by a scholar formerly at the Boltzmann Institute. 50

The subtitle of the journal Biography promises interdisciplinary scholarship. Thanks largely to Freud, psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to life narrative have appeared for over a century, with psychobiography emerging as a clearly delineated discipline. Alan C. Elms’s Uncovering Lives led the way, with William Todd Schultz’s Handbook of Psychobiography offering a synthesis of scholarly activity by such researchers as psychologist Dan P. McAdams, author of The Redemptive Self and many other studies of personality. 51 Other social sciences at times have taken their own biographical turn, among them both archaeology and anthropology. 52

Indigenous studies scholarship represents a significant emerging engagement. A special issue of Biography entitled “Indigenous Conversations about Biography” explores the genre’s value and dangers for researchers recovering or creating archives, histories, and life records. In The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen , Noenoe K. Silva refers to her method of establishing critical and publishing genealogies for Hawaiians writing in Hawaiian in the 19th and early 20th centuries as bio-bibliography. Fine arts scholars are also assessing what biography contributes to their disciplines. Melanie Unseld’s Biographie und Musikgeschichte examines the genre’s usefulness for those interested in musical culture and historiography, and a Biography special issue entitled “Verse Biography” should not be immediately conflated with literary biography. Though the lives discussed are in verse, the subjects are not necessarily writers. 53

In their introduction to “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice note that even though the term “life writing” is common in academic circles, and even though the plan for the seminar for contributors held in Honolulu was to “unpack, repack, and throw out terms once we’re at the table,” they chose to stay with biography because it “is well-known in Indigenous circles,” concluding that “there is still life in this old term ʻbiography’ yet.” 54 The same can be said for the publishing world; in fact, “biographies” are regularly appearing for non-human subjects. Noted biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd published London: The Biography in 2000 ; the “concise” version followed in 2012 . In Britain, biographies of the Ordnance Survey and the English Breakfast have also appeared. 55 Resisting relegation, biography can still raise and fulfill expectations of a chronological, substantial, and interesting narrative that deals with real subjects, human or otherwise—a good story, with the added virtue of being true.

Autobiography and Auto/Biography—Mapping Self-Representation

If autobiography studies began in the late 1970s, its institutionalization occurred in the mid- and late 1980s, and its later codification came with the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and works such as Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography , the years since 1990 have also seen sustained efforts to define and further theorize the genre in ways that expand its range and history. Handbooks such as the two editions of Linda Anderson’s Autobiography and Laura Marcus’s Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction offer brief, engaging entries into the genre’s past and present. Other efforts to map out auto/biography as a generic marker and critical practice include The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , edited by Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen. Much of the content first appeared in the pages of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , which they co-edit. Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies provides an overview of work being conducted in the field as the 21st century enters its third decade, often with suggestions for future directions. 56

Volumes devoted to theory include Carole Allamand’s book about Philippe Lejeune’s great influence on “ l’autobiographie en théorie ” or Lia Nicole Brozgal’s Against Autobiography . Marlene Kadar’s emphasis on the postmodern is mirrored in edited collections by Ashley et al. and Couser and Fichtelberg, and in Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s monograph Borderlines . 57 Other scholars turned their attention to the field’s historical and geographical reach. 58 In the United States, slave narratives have been a major subject for research. William L. Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story and Slavery and Class in the American South have been major contributions to this field. 59 If we add Rachel McLennan’s American Autobiography , the result is an emphatic rejection of Georges Gusdorf’s highly influential claim that autobiography was an 18th-century product of the Western European Enlightenment. 60

Over the course of his career, Paul John Eakin, one of the early champions of autobiographies as literary texts, has shifted his attention to autobiographies as foundational, even neurological, imperatives in all people. As the titles of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves and Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative suggest, his close readings of published autobiographies are gestures toward identifying the structures and narratives of consciousness that constitute humans as humans. More philosophical in emphasis, Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life shares Eakin’s conviction that autobiography offers valuable information about human nature. 61 Autobiography has however attracted most critical and theoretical interest in the realm of the political, often with feminism as the starting point. Liz Stanley’s The Auto/Biographical I and Laura Marcus’s Auto/Biographical Discourses were influential British monographs; and Broughton and Anderson’s edited collection, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times , turned the tables by suggesting that autobiography could contribute to feminist theory, as well as the other way around. Many of these monographs and collections were powerfully shaped by work on the distinctiveness of women’s writing, most notably the autobiographical/theoretical texts of Hélène Cixous such as Rootprints , which emerged from her famous writings in the 1970s on l’écriture féminine . Noted memoirists such as Jill Ker Conway, in her When Memory Speaks , also evaluate how differently men and women understand and write about their lives. 62

Other scholars have worked to establish traditions of women’s self-representation, whether Florence S. Boos in Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women ; Laura Beard’s Acts of Narrative Resistance , which focuses on autobiographical writing in the Americas; or Marilyn Booth’s Journal of Women’s History special issue, “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East.” Some of the most visible theoretical works address the challenges of speaking out through autobiography against political or social repression. A 2008 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly was simply entitled “Witness.” Two of the best-known monographs are Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons , which investigates the strategies Middle Eastern women employ to attract Western audiences in order to inform them about life during a time of forced globalization, emigration, and wars on terror; and Leigh Gilmore’s previously mentioned Tainted Witness , which looks at high-profile witnesses such as Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú to analyze the relationship between gender and credibility within patriarchal cultures. 63

Though strongly influenced by feminist theory, other critics and theorists extend their discussions of testimony out to a wide range of locations and chosen media. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons co-edited “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing” as a special issue of Biography . The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical , edited by Marlene Kadar and colleagues, explore the interplay between genre, location, national politics, ethics, and life narrative. Although Leigh Gilmore entitled her 2000 monograph The Limits of Autobiography , subtitled Trauma, Testimony, Theory— and although a 2008 Southern Review special issue explores “The Limits of Testimony”—developments such as the Me Too movement suggest that personal witnessing by the abused or persecuted will continue to attract the attention of autobiography scholars. 64

A similar impulse accounts for the close attention being paid to autobiographical sub-genres. Prominent among these is memoir, which some would argue should become the covering term. G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir: An Introduction offers a concise yet rich overview of the form, with an emphasis on American memoir, while Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History provides a detailed account of the form’s fortunes over time. Both Couser and Yagoda move smoothly between “literary” examples and more commercial texts, acknowledging that popular publications of the 21st century are primarily responsible for many critics and reviewers declaring that we are living during a memoir “boom.” As with autobiography, however, some critics are hesitant to let this form of life writing refer to almost any mode of self-representation. A 2018 edited collection describes its task as Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir . 65

Autobiography scholars have also directed their attention to the less prestigious, and even unpublished sub-genres of written self-representation. Philippe Lejeune’s longstanding interest in personal journals has resulted in articles and books drawing their subjects from over four centuries and a variety of media—from manuscripts to computer screens. On Diary , a collection of English translations on the subject, is similar in its distillation of stimulating thought to On Autobiography , Lejeune’s landmark 1989 collection. The sheer number, variety, and importance of his publications confirm his status as a pre-eminent scholar of self-representation since the 1980s. In French, his work on diary is complemented by such works as Françoise Simonet-Tenant’s Le journal intime . In English, decades before On Diary appeared, Lejeune made an important contribution to Inscribing the Daily , edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. In that same collection, Helen Buss’s “A Feminist Revision of New Historicism to Give Fuller Readings of Women’s Private Writing” offers another example of how contemporary feminist theory engaged with other theoretical movements, and often did so by drawing upon autobiography as a source for hidden or “sub-literary” women’s texts. 66

Since c. 1990 , the auto- in auto/biography studies has largely set the agenda for theoretical and critical approaches to life writing; indeed, for many scholars, autobiography is all but synonymous with life narrative. But as Marlene Kadar noted in 1992 , the term “life writing” offers possibilities for study that autobiography cannot accommodate, or will even distort, as a survey of what has been pursued under the life banner makes all too clear. 67

Life Writing and Life Narrative—Emergence and Pervasion

In the years since Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing appeared, many substantial works have addressed aspects and practices of life writing as an interdiscipline. Zachary Leader’s On Life-Writing is one of his many publications as a critic, theorist, and editor, and although literary biography is Richard Bradford’s primary interest, in his edited collection Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature , the term serves as a container for the more familiar designations. The title of Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader , a compendium of the most influential essays by two of autobiography’s most prolific and prominent critics, theorists, and editors, does something similar, and in fact many prominent a/b theorists have made the shift, at least in their titles, to a “life” designation. Liz Stanley’s 2013 edited collection is called Documents of Life Revisited , and the title of her 2010 guest-edited special issue of Life Writing is “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry.” Perhaps most significantly, almost twenty years after his landmark discussion of metaphors of self, James Olney, the acknowledged founder of autobiography studies, published Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing . 68

The term increasingly appeared in publications about its fortunes in academia. When Miriam Fuchs and I edited a volume for the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series, in the interests of full coverage, we entitled it Teaching Life Writing Texts . A decade later, Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas’s a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue on pedagogy, and the resulting Routledge edited collection, were both called “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives.” For its two clusters on the subject, the European Journal of Life Writing took the same title as Fuchs and me, with the obvious addition “in Europe.” 69

As has been the case with both biography and autobiography, as part of its codification life writing has undergone a great deal of historical and regional analysis. Sometimes the results are interdisciplinary, such as Penny Summerfield’s Histories of the Self , but in the case of the multi-volume Oxford History of Life-Writing (Zachary Leader gen. ed.) the goal is to produce a comprehensive survey. The first two volumes, covering the Middle Ages and the early modern period respectively, appeared in 2018 . Other decidedly British, period-based publications include David Amigoni’s edited collection Life Writing and Victorian Culture , and Andrew Tate’s special issue of Nineteenth Century Contexts , “Victorian Life Writing.” 70 The historical focus extends to France and Germany in the Modern Language Studies special issue “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing.” Entirely European surveys include Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, and German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century . 71

Continuing in the tradition of feminist critical interventions through autobiography, life writing has become a covering term for studies of women’s writing over the centuries and around the world. Some publications explicitly link theoretical positions to life writing; for instance, the Prose Studies special issue devoted to “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” which puts Benedict Anderson’s brand of political science and cultural history into play. Other works employ life writing to map out genealogies of women authors and intellectuals. The edited collection Writing Medieval Women’s Lives reclaims a number of European subjects, and after writing Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing , Julie Eckerle co-edited Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland with Naomi McAreavey. Reversing the pattern, Amy Culley followed up Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850 , a collection co-edited with Daniel Cook, with a monograph entitled British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840 . 72 Susan Civale’s Romantic Women’s Life Writing covers much of the British nineteenth century , as does “Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing,” a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century . Another co-edited collection, Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading , ranges from slave narratives to Virginia Woolf. Finally, in Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism , Margaretta Jolly argues for the enduring power of written correspondence, whether on paper or as e-mail. 73

Delineations of criticism and theory from specific regions have adopted life writing as an organizing principle. “African American Life Writing” is the title of an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue; other volumes dealing with North American subjects include Viola Amato’s Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture , and Katherine Adams’s monograph Owning Up . 74 Ongoing work on European life writing has resulted in several survey collections. Life Writing Matters in Europe , paradoxically published in the Winter-Verlag American Studies series, is one of the more expansive volumes, but the region examined can be more specific, as in Simona Mitroiu’s Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe , or the European Journal of Life Writing ’s cluster “Life Writing Trajectories in Post- 1989 Eastern Europe”—despite the fact that “Eastern Europe” is a highly contested term. 75 A life-narrative focus can also govern work on non-European and non-North American regions, whether Africa, Australia, the Pacific, or South East Asia. 76 As for India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies has featured a cluster entitled “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of Life Writing,” and Biography ’s 2017 special issue, “Caste and Life Narratives,” has been republished in India as an edited collection. An especially ambitious effort at global reach is Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies , which features essays about Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, Great Britain, Hawaiʻi, Iraq, Australia, India, and China as part of its effort to interrogate the dominance of Euro-American theoretical paradigms. 77

A number of prominent scholars have devoted books to decolonial, postcolonial, and diasporic life writing. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Life-Writing presented itself as “the first critical assessment” of such texts in English. Philip Holden’s Autobiography and Decolonization casts a wide net in its analysis of life writing by Asian and African leaders of countries emerging from imperial occupation, and Gillian Whitlock’s Postcolonial Life Narratives surveys 18th- to 21st-century works by Indigenous and settler life writers on at least four continents. Edited collections include the 2013 special issue of Life Writing entitled “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” and the books Ethnic Life Writing and Histories and Transculturing Auto/Biography . 78

Life writing has become a common component across disciplinary fields. “The Work of Life Writing,” an a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue, features articles grounded in family dynamics, working-class autobiography, ethnography, ecological studies, philosophy, medicine, political and social commentary, and institutional investigations. Paul John Eakin’s edited collection The Ethics of Life Writing foregrounds the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also explores testimonio , race, disclosure, and life writing as an agent of harm. David Parker’s The Self in Moral Space examines life writing as a site for ethical analysis. Life Writing has published a special issue entitled “Philosophy and Life Writing,” and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies one called “Life Writing as Empathy.” On a more discursive note, Joan Ramon Resina’s edited collection Inscribed Identities focuses on language as constitutive of the subject. 79

Vulnerability and precarity are central concerns for many life-writing sub-genres. Since the late 20th century , G. Thomas Couser has been the most prominent scholar exploring the relationship between life narrative and disability in his monographs and edited and co-edited collections. 80 Trauma in its various forms has been an important concern for life-writing scholars. Suzette A. Henke’s Shattered Subjects was one of the first publications to address profound physical and psychological upheavals, experienced personally or collectively. Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk examines how crisis leads to cultural expression in media ranging from film to hybrid literary forms, and from quilting to comics. Miriam Fuchs’s The Text Is Myself explores the different forms life writing can take in response to historical, political, and personal assault. Gillian Whitlock and Kate Douglas’s co-edited Trauma Texts began as a special issue of Life Writing entitled “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century”; another edited collection in this field is Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma . 81 Meg Jensen’s The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical discusses prison poems, testimonio , war memorials, and other sites of commemoration as “complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath.” Life writing and medicine has been attracting increasing attention. Mita Banerjee’s Medical Humanities in American Studies is a representative example. 82

Trauma can also be collective and global, and life writing often proves to be a crucial factor in judgment and restitution. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores how personal narratives often serve as the chosen response to national violence and deliberate crimes against humanity. Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly’s edited collection We Shall Bear Witness , and Katja Kurz’s monograph Narrating Contested Lives , both of which appeared in 2014 , also discuss life writing in the context of human rights. Testimony against institutional abuse is the subject of Melissa Dearey’s Radicalization , and social movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter foreground life narrative as a strategy for opposing oppression and violence carried out by state agents and those invested in economic, political, or cultural dominance. Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey’s co-edited special issue of Biography , “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” combines theory and personal testimony in an innovative manner. 83

Are Life Narratives always Life Writing?

Many critical and theoretical works of the 21st century seem to leave the writing behind—a major reason life narrative is increasingly chosen as the covering term. While Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames is one of the most important books on life writing for many reasons, her attention to the power of images on the understanding of the past, extending even to Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus , has been profoundly influential. By calling attention to the frequent disjunctions between text and photographs, Timothy Dow Adams’s Light Writing & Life Writing is also a transitional text of sorts, anticipating the emergence of comics and other visual and verbal hybrids as major sites for examining life representation. 84 “Autographics,” a Biography special issue co-edited by Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, is one of many collections and monographs that explore how life narratives are embodied in comic and other graphic forms. Hillary Chute, a prolific editor, interviewer, archivist, critic, and theorist of comics, has published two monographs that document the intersections of comics, life writing, feminism, and history: Graphic Women and Disaster Drawn . 85 Michael A. Chaney’s Reading Lessons in Seeing , and his edited collection Graphic Subjects , are substantial contributions to theorizing the interplay between life writing and comics. Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics is another extended study, and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley’s co-edited collection Canadian Graphic is devoted to a single country’s comics life-writing production. 86

Critical and theoretical work on other hybrid genres includes Anna Poletti’s Intimate Ephemera , Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors , and Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s Picturing Identity , which discusses forms ranging from book art to comics to sketch illustrations to geographic installations. Almost any life-writing analysis must now engage with the pervasiveness of visual representation, which can be recognized as having been an important component for many centuries as well. For instance, the texts examined in Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s Witnessing Girlhood , a study of testimonial traditions that draws together gender, youth, and race, range from slave narratives and testimonio to comics and picture books. 87

Responding to the proliferation of critical and theoretical engagements across genres, media, and disciplines, in a special issue of Life Writing , and a subsequent book, co-editors David McCooey and Maria Takolander ask what “the limits of life writing,” if any, might be. Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser implicitly ask the same question in their co-edited Biography special issue entitled “(Post)Human Lives”; and in another Biography special issue, “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” co-editors Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons's examine how analogies to human life narratives pervade institutional and business self-promotion. Grounding lives in natural environments is the organizing principle for Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng’s co-edited collection Ecology and Life Writing . 88 Just as trade publishers are labeling engaging narratives about anything from God to salt as biographies, so the critical concept of life writing is being stretched to contain virtually anything that presents or mimics a human story.

In terms of critical and theoretical attention, however, no medium for life narratives has been more immediately recognized in its emergence, or more closely examined, than what a pair of Biography special issues have identified as “Online Lives” and “Online Lives 2.0.” Anna Poletti and Julie Rak address the same phenomenon in their edited collection Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online . 89 The prevalence, and even dominance, of life narratives in online environments has caused critics and theorists to recalibrate their work to account for this migration and mediation. This is especially true for studies of young life writers. The title of Emma Maguire’s book Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies takes for granted that the narratives to be discussed will be online, and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti’s Life Narratives and Youth Culture ranges from more traditional memoirs, letters, and diaries to social media. 90

Moving beyond the exclusively written has also revivified a longstanding awareness of biography as performance. Popular from film’s earliest days, the biopic has attracted substantial critical and theoretical attention. George Custen’s pathbreaking volume Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History was published in 1992 , and a Biography special issue entitled “The Biopic,” edited by Glenn Man, appeared in 2000 . Originally a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer’s co-edited Invented Lives, Imagined Communities dwells on the history and the cultural shaping force of film biographies. While providing a historical overview, Dennis Bingham’s massive Whose Lives Are They Anyway? focuses on post-World War II films, with a particular emphasis on biopics with women subjects. Tom Brown and Belén Vidal’s co-edited collection The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture takes on a similar subject. 91 Biopic critics’ interest in actors and impersonation links their work to life-writing studies of performance. Ryan Claycomb’s Lives in Play argues that since the 1970s, life narratives have been central to the construction and performance of feminist theater. A special issue of LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship entitled “Performing Lives” focuses upon the literal and metaphorical aspects of performance resulting from life writing’s migration “into other media including film, television, online, theatre, and the gallery.” Other scholars are studying those figures whose performance of their public identities led to great and enduring notoriety or acclaim. Clara Tuite’s Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity subordinates the events of Byron’s life to a study of the fascination he aroused, and continued to arouse, in the public. Daniel Herwitz discusses celebrity in The Star as Icon , and Katja Lee and Lorraine York tackle a similar subject in their co-edited collection Celebrity Cultures in Canada , though they restrict their stargazing to a single country. 92 Fan studies are an integral part of popular-culture scholarship, employing a vocabulary awash in terms such as idols, icons, influencers, and “reality” stars.

The quotation marks around “reality” point to a critical commonplace about life writing—that as acts of representation, such texts necessarily employ fictional materials and constructs. The veracity claims of life-writing texts, captured in a term like non-fiction, are always under scrutiny, and sometimes considered subordinate to concerns with aesthetics or craft—a belief expressed in the term “creative non-fiction.” Efforts to blur or eliminate the borders between fiction and non-fiction are often motivated by a desire to absorb life narratives back into the domain of literature, and principally prose fiction, where the commitment to art may require writers to remake historical fact or the contents of memory in response to the demands of form and aesthetics. Although Serge Doubrovsky is credited with coining the term “autofiction” in the 1970s to describe his own work, many critical and theoretical monographs treat this process as their principal concern, among them Max Saunders’s Self-Impression , and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir’s Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction . Edited collections also address the significance of these generic boundaries. Chief among these is Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf’s three-volume Handbook of Autobiogography/Autofiction . In Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo suggest that the interplay between personal histories and aesthetics has a profound moral component, while the title Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction suggests where that volume’s editors consider the most interesting of those experiments to occur. A related juxtaposition appears in the title of Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet’s co-edited volume Genèse et autofiction , and the title of Helena Grice’s Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing lays out a continuum of sorts. 93

The greatest champion for biofiction as a sub-discipline is critic and theorist Michael Lackey, who has written, edited, or co-edited numerous books and collections. 94 It is fair to say that those interested in biofiction are primarily concerned with how the historical is drawn into the literary, and that the resulting sub-genre’s appeal is not its historical veracity, but its enlistment of history and biography in the cause of literary aesthetics. One parallel but distinctly different area of interest regards the hoax life narrative. Susanna Egan’s Burdens of Proof evaluates a number of texts produced through literary imposture, and Nancy K. Miller’s “The Entangled Self” is an astute and suggestive discussion of the issue. 95

The discussion has travelled full circle—from a virtual abandonment of the desire to see life writing as literature, or even necessarily verbal, with a corresponding emphasis on the cultural, political, visual, or virtual, to a reassertion of literature, and more specifically prose fiction, as setting the highest and most appropriate standards for writers of historically and biographically informed creative prose. The journey itself, however, suggests just how capacious the term “life writing” has become.

Future Thoughts—Life, Biobits, and the Environment

Marlene Kadar argued in 1992 that life writing had to extend itself beyond genre to critical practice. 96 In the intervening years, the number of genres and sub-genres, the amount of critical and theoretical attention, and the variety of practices undertaken have increased at an accelerating rate. It seems appropriate to close with some observations about how rethinking certain components of life writing as understood, theorized, and practiced might lead to new directions and widened perspectives. Those components are the fundamental ones—“life” and “writing/narrative.” Lauren Berlant offers insights into the first, and Marlene Kadar the second. With Kadar again providing the enabling metaphor, the discussion will finally turn to what should be the next theoretical transition for life writing—from practice to environment.

After being invited to witness “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” the 2010 International Auto/Biography Association conference held in Sussex, United Kingdom, Lauren Berlant was asked her opinion about how the participants had dealt not only with her famous term, but also with life writing, the organization’s reason for being. Berlant confessed she was “worried about the presumed self-evident value of bionarrative”:

I kept asking people to interrogate how the story of having a “life” itself coasts on a normative notion of human biocontinuity: what does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something? . . . To my ear, the genre of the “life” is a most destructive conventionalized form of normativity: when norms feel like laws, they constitute a sociology of the rules for belonging and intelligibility whose narrowness threatens people’s capacity to invent ways to attach to the world. 97

Berlant’s comment is very helpful, because it prompts us to look seriously at the “bio” of autobiography and biography, and at the “life” of life writing. She suggests locales where this interrogation is already underway:

Queer, socialist/anti-capitalist, and feminist work have all been about multiplying the ways we know that people have lived and can live, so that it would be possible to take up any number of positions during and in life in order to have “a life.” 98

Such work has expanded the range and value of life writing as a practice; an even stronger commitment to determining what is meant by “a life” can only lead to new possibilities for socially and politically engaged scholarship.

But Berlant is suspicious of “writing” as well, and not because the attention of so much scholarship has been redirected to graphic narratives, or online. Her concern about the “self-evident value of bionarrative” also suggests that replacing “life writing” with “life narrative” as the covering term might still set an uninterrogated limit on what we should be examining. Entertaining the possibility of “a biography of gesture, of interruption,” Berlant asks rhetorically “Shouldn’t life writing be a primary laboratory for theorizing ʻthe event’?” 99 Marlene Kadar argues that such theoretical practice is already happening. In her essay “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust,” she campaigns for including “the fragment and trace as member-genres in the taxonomy of auto/biographical practices” outlined in such theoretical works as her own “(flawed) 1992 definition of life-writing texts.” 100 Drawing upon Blanchot’s sense of the fragment as “an unfinished separation that is always reaching out for further interpretation,” Kadar suggests that when confronted with the near-erasure of all evidence that a life was ever lived, we can register affect even when lacking narrative. Any surviving evidence of a life can potentially express “more than what happened,” and anything that “helps us to understand what the particular event means to the subject, can be read as autobiographical.” Whether a song, a tattoo, an anecdote, or a name on a list, in its evocative yet resisting brevity, the fragment speaks of a life without providing even the outline of a realized narrative—“what it felt like, not exactly what it was like.” 101 Kadar therefore sets forth “the fragment and trace as genres that both contribute to our previous theorizations” of autobiography and life narrative, but “also as necessarily unfinished genres that call out to us to attempt to finish them”—often with important critical and political results. 102 One might add that, in discursive terms, the fragment or trace can be thought of as analogous to the morpheme—they are the smallest units recognizable as evidence of a life. With an embedded reference to virtual and online representation, these fragments and traces might be termed “biobits.”

The biobit would represent the micro limit of life writing theory; drawing upon but extending Kadar once more, one can suggest what the macro might be. In “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” Kadar insists on the need to “theorize a new genre that still goes beyond and yet includes the old word [autobiography], the old gender, and the old style,” but will also “name what is now.” But this new genre must differ markedly from our common understanding, because “like water,” which “assumes the shape of the vessel” containing it, the nature of the contents of this new genre will not be determined or defined by the container. The “essence” of genre “can never really be captured.” 103 To elaborate on this thought, Kadar turns to a novel by Gail Scott. While most of the main character’s life takes place in a bathtub, we know that at some point she will have to leave it—a move that will carry her “Out of the Bathtub and into Narrative.” Life writing, then, is best thought of not as a container, a genre, or a practice, but to the greatest extent possible, as a component of uncontained water: an ocean, an environment in which micro biomass—biobits—coexists with the largest, most familiar, most coherent examples—the biographies and autobiographies, the autoethnographies and the biopics, the online presences and the comics. Though all are in some way engaged in and linked through bio-representation, only some are implicated in writing, or even in narrative.

If viewed in this way, all of life writing’s inherited genres and sub-genres remain useful and productive methods for describing, comparing, and acting. But it must always be remembered that neither genre nor practice is sufficient as a ground or container for theorizing what may still be called life writing or life narrative, but could perhaps be more accurately referred to as signs of life.

1. See Julie Rak, “Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing: Feminist Theory outside the Lines,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 3 (2018): 541–549 ; Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing , ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992 ), 3–16, quotation at 4; and Donald J. Winslow, Life-Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms , Biography Monographs (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980 ). Winslow’s book first appeared as Donald J. Winslow, “Glossary of Terms in Life Writing,” pts. 1 and 2, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1978): 61–78; and 1, no. 2 (1978): 61–85.

2. For the phrase “the New Critical wolf,” see Marlene Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative,” in Kadar, Essays on Life Writing , 152–161, at 154. For the other quotations, see Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 4–6.

3. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 9.

4. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

5. Kadar “Coming to Terms,” 12. Kadar notes that her argument here is informed by pp. 162–165 of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women,” in Feminist Issues in Literature Scholarship , ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 ), 161–180.

6. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical , ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 ), 3–27.

7. For a sampling of such texts, see Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians , reprinted ed. (London: Penguin, 1990 ; 1st ed. 1918); Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928 ); Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: Norton, 1987 ); and Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984 ). For a post-structuralist approach to biography, see William H. Epstein, ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991 ).

8. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 ).

9. Ricia Anne Chansky, “General Introduction,” in The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , eds. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen (London and New York: Routledge, 2016 ), xx–xxii, quotations at xx and xxi.

10. Sidonie Smith, “Foreword,” in Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader , xvii–xix, at xviii.

11. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 ).

12. See, for example, Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Modern Language Notes 94, no. 5 (1979) : 919–930; and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977 ).

13. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography , by Philippe Lejeune, trans. Katherine Leary, with a foreword by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30 (the essay was originally published in French in 1977); Paul John Eakin, Fictions of Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) ; and Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Princeton University Press, 1992) .

14. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) ; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) .

15. For works by the authors and editors mentioned in this paragraph, see the “Further Reading” section.

16. Margaretta Jolly, ed., Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms , 2 vols. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001) , quotations at ix and x.

17. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) .

18. Jolly, Encyclopedia , ix, x.

19. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) , 2. The first edition was published in 2001; for convenience this article quotes from the second edition.

20. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 3, 4.

21. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211, citing Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory .

22. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 211.

23. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 204–205.

24. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 214. The works they mention are: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) ; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) ; and Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) .

25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 216. They cite John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography,” Differences 6, no. 1 (1994) : 1–27.

26. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 215.

27. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 218.

28. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography , 234. Their Appendix A is at 253–286.

29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) , pp. 121–126. There isn’t a citation for Kadar—that’s me saying she would agree with Williams on this. The Williams distinction is a commonplace by now.

30. Kadar, “Coming to Terms,” 10.

31. I have written at some length about this in relation to Renders and De Haan and the Biographers International Organization, with particular attention paid to Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly , which I co-edit; the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Center for Biographical Research, which I direct; and the International Auto/Biography Association-Listserv, which I manage. See Craig Howes, “What Are We Turning From? Research and Ideology in Biography and Life Writing,” in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History , eds. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) , 165–175.

32. Hans Renders, “Biography in Academia and the Critical Frontier in Life Writing,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing , eds. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Leiden: Brill, 2013) , 169–176, at 169. Michael Holroyd, “Changing fashions in biography,” The Guardian , 6 November 2009 .

33. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

34. Renders, “Biography in Academia,” 172.

35. For a more detailed account of this suspicion, see Craig Howes, “Ethics and Literary Biography,” in A Companion to Literary Biography , ed. Richard Bradford (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2018) , 123–142. It should be noted that while they may share an aversion to criticism and theory, if anything, literary artists often have a greater contempt for biographers.

36. Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) , quotations at 4 and 3; and Julie Rak, ed., “Pop Life,” special issue, Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 3 (2008) .

37. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) .

38. Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Andrew Brown, A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs (London: Hesperus, 2011) ; Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives; Themes and Genres . Twayne's Studies in Literary Themes and Genres (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) ; and Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) .

39. Carl Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, CA: Salem, 1992) . Among Rollyson’s many other works are: Carl Rollyson, Reading Biography (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004) ; Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005) ; and Carl Rollyson, Confessions of a Serial Biographer (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2016) .

40. Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008) ; and Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders, The ABC of Modern Biography (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) .

41. Edel, Writing Lives ; Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002) ; Rollyson, Confessions ; Nigel Hamilton, How To Do Biography: A Primer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) ; and Hamilton, Biography .

42. John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) ; Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley, eds., Writing the Lives of Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) ; Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard, eds., Les nouvelles écritures biographiques (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013) ; and Richard Bradford, ed., A Companion to Literary Biography (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019) . My essay “Ethics and Literary Biography” appears in Bradford’s collection.

43. Michael Benton, Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; Rana Tekcan, Too Far for Comfort: A Study on Biographical Distance (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2015) ; and Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) . She mentions her reservations at 130.

44. Barbara Caine, Biography and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) ; Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, eds., Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Leiden: Brill, 2013) ; Renders, de Haan, and Harmsma, The Biographical Turn ; and Tanya Evans and Robert Reynolds, “Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing,” disclosure 21 (2012) : 1–8.

45. Atiba Pertilla and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., “Forum: The Challenge of Biography,” special section, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 55 (2014) ; and Sarah Panter, ed., Mobility and Biography , Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte / European History Yearbook 16 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015) .

46. Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography , vol. 2, Genres and Contexts (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014) ; Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Sarah Mombert and Michèle Rosellini, eds., Usages des vies: Le biographique hier et aujourd’hui (XVIIe–XXIe siècle) (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2012) ; and Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century “Hidden” Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) .

47. Examples of such work include: Robin Humphrey, Robert Miller, and Elena Zdravomyslova, eds., Biographical Research in Eastern Europe: Altered Lives and Broken Biographies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2003) ; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir et al., eds., Biography, Gender and History: Nordic Perspectives (Turku: K&H, 2017) ; and Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Toisten elämät: Kirjoituksia elämäkerroista (Avain, 2017) .

48. Wilhelm Hemecker, ed., Die Biographie—Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) ; Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, eds., with Gregor Schima, Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018) ; Bernhard Fetz and Wilhelm Hemecker, eds., Theorie der Biographie: Grundlagentexte und Kommentar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) ; and Bernhard Fetz, ed., Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) . All these except the Hemecker and Saunders volume were published by De Gruyter on behalf of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute.

49. Marta Dvorak, ed., Biographical Creation / La création biographique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 1997) .

50. Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (New York: Peter Lang, 2004) ; and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2020) .

51. Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) ; William Todd Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ; and Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) .

52. See, for example, Carolyn L. White, ed., The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (New York: Springer, 2009) ; Ann L. W. Stodder and Ann M. Palkovich, eds., The Bioarchaeology of Individuals (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012) ; Michaela Köttig et al., eds., “Biography and Ethnicity,” special issue, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10, no. 3 (2009) ; and Sophie Day Carsten and Charles Stafford, eds., “Reason and Passion: The Parallel Worlds of Ethnography and Biography,” special issue, Social Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2018) : 5–14.

53. Alice Te Punga Somerville, Daniel Heath Justice, and Noelani Arista, eds., “Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247; Noenoe K. Silva, The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) ; Melanie Unseld, Biographie und Musikgeschichte: Wandlungen biographischer Konzepte in Musikkultur und Musikhistoriographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014) ; and Anna Jackson, ed., “The Verse Biography,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Winter 2016) .

54. Alice Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice, “Introduction: Indigenous Conversations about Biography,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2016) : 239–247, at 243.

55. Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) ; Peter Ackroyd, London: The Concise Biography (London: Vintage, 2012) ; Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2011) ; and Kaori O’Connor, The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal, with Recipes , rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) .

56. Linda Anderson, Autobiography , 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010 ; 1st ed. 2001); Laura Marcus, Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Chansky and Hipchen, The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader ; and Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell, eds., Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (London: Routledge, 2019) .

57. Carole Allamand, Le “Pacte” de Philippe Lejeune; ou, L’autobiographie en théorie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018) ; Lia Nicole Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) ; Kathleen Ashley, et al., eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) ; G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, eds., True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1998) ; and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003) .

58. For examples of such historical and geographical investigations, see Carsten Heinze and Alfred Hornung, eds., Medialisierungsformen des (Auto-) Biografischen (Konstanz: UVK, 2013) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) ; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007) ; and Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch, eds., Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011) .

59. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and William L. Andrews, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony , 1840–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) .

60. Rachel McLennan, American Autobiography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) . Georges Gusdorf “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” pp. 28–48.

61. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories ; Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) ; and Richard Freadman, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) .

62. Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) ; Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) ; Trev Broughton and Linda Anderson, eds., Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) ; Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing , trans. Eric Prenowitz (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) ; and Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998) .

63. Florence S. Boos, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) ; Laura J. Beard, Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) ; Marilyn Booth, ed., “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 2 (2013) ; Kathryn Abrams and Irene Kacandes, eds., “Witness,” special issue, Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1–2 (2008) : 13–27; Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) ; and Gilmore, Tainted Witness .

64. Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2004) ; Marlene Kadar et al., eds., Tracing the Autobiographical (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005) ; Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, Testimony, Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) ; and Paul Atkinson and Anna Poletti, eds., “The Limits of Testimony,” special issue, Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 40, no. 3 (2008) .

65. G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Penguin, 2009) ; and Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, eds., Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) .

66. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary , trans. Kathy Durnin, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009) ; Lejeune, On Autobiography ; Françoise Simonet-Tenant, Le journal intime: Genre littéraire et écriture ordinaire (Paris: Téraèdre, 2004) ; and Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) .

67. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

68. Zachary Leader, ed., On Life-Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Richard Bradford, ed., Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (Ann Arbor: Maize Books, 2017) ; Liz Stanley, ed., Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Liz Stanley, ed., “In Dialogue: Life Writing and Narrative Inquiry,” special issue, Life Writing 7, no. 1 (2010) : 1–3; and James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) .

69. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes, eds., Teaching Life Writing Texts , Options for Teaching (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., “Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 1 (2016) ; Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas, eds., Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (London and New York: Routledge, 2018 ); Dennis Kersten and Anne Marie Mreijen, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 4 (2015) ; and Dennis Kersten, Anne Marie Mreijen, and Yvonne Delhey, eds., “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe, Part II,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 7 (2018) .

70. Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Karen A. Winstead, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 1, The Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-Writing , vol. 2, Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) ; David Amigoni, ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006) ; Andrew Tate, ed., “Victorian Life Writing,” special issue, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, no. 1 (2006) : 1–3; and Lynn M. Linder, ed., “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing,” special issue, Modern Language Studies 52, no. 2 (2016) : 121–129.

71. Danielle Boillet, Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, and Hélène Tropé, eds., Écrire des vies: Espagne, France, Italie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012) ; and Birgit Dahlke, Dennis Tate, and Roger Woods, eds., German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010) .

72. Cynthia Huff, ed., “Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities,” special issue, Prose Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (2003) ; Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone, eds., Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 ); Julie A. Eckerle, Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013) ; Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, eds., Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland , Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019) ; Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, eds., Women’s Life Writing , 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) ; and Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing , 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .

73. Susan Civale, Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) ; Alexis Wolf, “Introduction: Reading Silence in the Long Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing Archive,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 27 (2018) : unpaginated; Valérie Baisnée-Keay et al., eds., Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; and Margaretta Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) .

74. Eric D. Lamore, ed., “African American Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27, no. 1 (2012) ; Viola Amato, Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016) ; and Katherine Adams, Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) .

75. Marijke Huisman et al., eds., Life Writing Matters in Europe , American Studies Monograph 217 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012) ; Simona Mitroiu, ed., Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ; and Iona Luca and Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, eds., “Life Writing Trajectories in Post-1989 Eastern Europe,” special section, European Journal of Life Writing 2 (2013) : T1–9.

76. Oliver Nyambi, Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe: Versions and Subversions of Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; David McCooey, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ; Jack Bowers, Strangers at Home: Place, Belonging, and Australian Life Writing (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2016) ; Brij V. Lal and Peter Hempenstall, eds., Pacific Lives, Pacific Places: Bursting Boundaries in Pacific History (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 2001) ; Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, eds., Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015) ; and Roxanna Waterson, ed., Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007) .

77. Hephzibah Israel and John Zavos, “Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian Traditions of ‘Life Writing,’” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (2018) : 352–365; S. Shankar and Charu Gupta, “Caste and Life Narratives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2017) ; and Maureen Perkins, ed., Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012) . My own essay on Martin Amis appears in this last collection.

78. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) ; Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) ; Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Suzanne Scafe and Jenni Ramone, eds., “Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora,” special issue, Life Writing 10, no. 1 (2013) : 1–3; Rocío G. Davis, Jaume Aurell, and Ana Beatriz Delgado, eds., Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007) ; and Rosalia Baena, ed., Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) .

79. Clare Brant and Max Saunders, eds., “The Work of Life Writing,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 25, no. 2 (2010) ; Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) ; David Parker, The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) ; D. L. LeMahieu and Christopher Cowley, eds., “Philosophy and Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 15, no. 3 (2018) : 301–303; Rocío G. Davis, ed., “Life Writing as Empathy,” special issue, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42, no. 2 (2016) ; and Joan Ramon Resina, ed., Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) .

80. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) ; G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) ; G. Thomas Couser, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., “Disability and Life Writing,” special issue, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 3 (2011) ; G. Thomas Couser, ed., Body Language: Narrating Illness and Disability (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) ; and G. Thomas Couser and Susannah Mintz, eds., Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives , 2 vols. (Detroit: St. James Press, 2019) .

81. Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) ; Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) ; Miriam Fuchs, The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) ; Gilian Whitlock and Kate Douglas, eds., Trauma Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) , first published as “Trauma in the Twenty-First Century,” Life Writing 5, no. 1 (2008); and Gabriele Rippl et al., eds., Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) .

82. Meg Jensen, The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2019) , quotation at 8; and Mita Banerjee, Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography , American Studies Series 292 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018) .

83. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (London: Palgrave, 2004) ; Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly, eds., We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) ; Katja Kurz, Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014) ; Melissa Dearey, Radicalization: The Life Writings of Political Prisoners (London and New York: Routledge, 2010) ; and Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey, eds., “M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2018) : 731–740.

84. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) ; and Timonthy Dow Adams, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) .

85. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, eds., “Autographics,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2008) ; Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) ; and Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) .

86. Michael A. Chaney, Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017) ; Michael A. Chaney, ed., Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) ; Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012) ; and Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds., Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

87. Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008) ; Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) ; and Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) .

88. David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., “The Limits of Life Writing,” special issue, Life Writing 14, no. 3 (2017) ; David McCooey and Maria Takolander, eds., The Limits of Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) ; Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser, eds., “(Post)Human Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2012) ; Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons, eds., “Life Writing and Corporate Personhood,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2014) ; and Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng, eds., Ecology and Life Writing (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013) .

89. John Zuern, ed., “Online Lives,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2003) ; Laurie McNeill and John Zuern, eds., “Online Lives 2.0,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2015) ; and Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, eds., Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 2014) .

90. Emma Maguire, Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave, 2018) ; and Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) .

91. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) ; Glenn Man, ed., “The Biopic,” special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2000) ; William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, eds., Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) ; Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010) ; and Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, eds., The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture , AFI Film Readers (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) .

92. Ryan Claycomb, Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012) ; Victoria Kuttainen and Lindsay Simpson, eds., “Performing Lives,” special issue, LiNQ: Connected Writing and Scholarship 39, no. 1 (2012) , quotation from the editors’ “Introduction: Performing Lives,” 11–14, at 11; Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) ; Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) ; and Katja Lee and Lorraine York, eds., Celebrity Cultures in Canada (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) .

93. Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) ; Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) ; Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction , 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) ; Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo, Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos of Our Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2009) ; Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, eds., Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ; Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet, eds., Genèse et autofiction (Paris: Academia-Bruylant, 2007) ; and Helena Grice, Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing: International Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) .

94. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) ; Michael Lackey, Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) ; Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) ; Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) ; Michael Lackey, Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) ; and Michael Lackey, ed., “Biofictions,” special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016) .

95. Susanna Egan, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011) ; and Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007) : 537–548.

96. Kadar, “Coming to Terms.”

97. Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2011) : 180–187, at 183.

98. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 182.

99. Berlant and Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics,” 181.

100. Marlen Kadar, “The Devouring: Traces of Roma in the Holocaust; No Tattoo, Sterilized Body, Gypsy Girl,” in Kadar et al., Tracing the Autobiographical , 223–246, at 223–224.

101. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 243. On the fragment as “an unfinished separation” Kadar is citing Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster , trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) .

102. Kadar, “The Devouring,” 226.

103. Kadar, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” quotations at 153.

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Essay, Life, Lived Experience: The Early Georg Lukacs and the Situation of Literary Criticism Today

T hat we like the essay as a genre of writing and reading belongs to our self-understood premises, as early twenty-first century intellectuals. If immediate evidence was necessary, it could be encountered in most of the texts making up the collection to which this essay belongs. For example, invoking authorities beyond any possible doubt or skepticism, like Francis Ponge and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the foundational essays of Michel de Montaigne’s find praise as a “search with no end nor resting place” in Sarah Bakewell’s contribution. What for Sophie Gee distinguishes Jonathan Swift’s worldview from that of his contemporaries is the capacity to “depict minds in disrepair” without claiming an “authority to correct internal turmoil.” Thomas Harrison explains how the essayistic form of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities emerged from his attempt to forge a flexible bond between “the literary realm and the realm of the ethical,” while Alex Woloch describes the manner of George Orwell’s essays as “unstable, precarious, short-lived,” and Michael Wood shows that “taking ‘as if’ no less seriously than ‘is’” was decisive for the essay form as a “project” in Jorge Luis Borges’s work.

The vanishing point of all these analyses and the reason for our self-understood sympathy for the genre lies in a gesture of lightness and distance that the different varieties of the essay seem to share. A distance not only from any suggestions of orthodoxy in our post-ideological and perhaps even post-political times, but also from any spiritual position that comes with the impulse of changing and thus suspending itself. Even Gianni Vattimo’s notion of “weak thinking” that produced so much resonance in an earlier post-ideological moment some thirty years ago, would paradoxically appear all-too totalizing in a present-day view. This is why we are eager to associate the essay as a form with concepts and qualities like “vitality, personality, and the concreteness of life-experience” [1] which cannot be subsumed under abstract and therefore general principles. Some of us would even go so far as to wish for the essayistic form to become omnipresent so that, paradoxically, not being principled might establish itself as an absolute principle. But profound flexibility as its core component has made the essay both a practical challenge for all “large systems that ground their truth claims in authoritative traditions and institutions” and a genre without a clear trajectory or historical evolution. Due to the same reason, the essay has also become an environment for “hectic developments towards eccentricity and intellectual isolation.” [2]

My main question will be whether, given our obvious affinity today with the essay’s intellectual potential, the genre could become the frame for a new, decidedly contemporaneous style of literary criticism. In relation to this quest, which has by now become an option discussed in different academic cultures, a specific tension from the tradition of the essay in the German-speaking world could be of particular relevance. It may not be very surprising to state that, as a form of distance and flexibility, the essay has never become quite as ubiquitous there as, for example, in English or in French culture. By contrast, if we look at those extreme cases where the essay’s central potential of flexibility turns into a paradoxical principle, German language, German author names, and German debates clearly stand in the foreground. Specifically for academic literary criticism and art criticism, such positions had to provoke the protest and the resistance of a professional practice that, since the early nineteenth century, has understood itself as “scientific” ( wissenschaftlich ) in the development of the German university. I believe that this tension between the “scientific,” strictly anti-essayistic conception of criticism and its “rhapsodic” opposite (the adjective “rhapsodisch” has indeed been frequently used by German enemies of the eccentric position) can turn into a clarifying and contrastive background for the discussion of different nuances, modes, and options of criticism that are less visibly polarized in their own national worlds of origin.

Reenergizing this traditional tension, Juergen Kaube, one of the most influential protagonists in the German Humanities and Arts world today, [3] recently published a polemical essay (was it an ironic strategy to choose the essayistic form?) against the ongoing tendency of academic Humanists—even in Germany—to use some rhapsodic varieties of the essay tradition within their professional work. [4] His starting point is the statistically based observation that, for presentations of their thinking in academic or non-academic space, most scholars in the Humanities, unlike the standard in the Natural Sciences or in the Social Sciences, avoid free speech and the use of power point technology. They prefer to read aloud manuscripts that they clearly did not compose with this type of delivery in mind—and which are therefore always difficult and often truly impossible to understand. Kaube interprets this habit as symptom of a particular emotional fixation among Humanists on their own texts. To write in a complex and (pretendedly) beautiful fashion, according to him, follows the urge to find a form of representation “adequate to phenomena in and by themselves”—rather than adequate for a community of colleagues and geared towards joint intellectual progress. The essay’s frequent lack of footnotes, of clearly circumscribed questions and goals, and of discussions regarding competing views, allows Kaube to draw the vitriolic conclusion that such critical essays represent a “high form of leisure within the beautiful Humanities”—and thus can not be regarded as contributions towards the growth of knowledge within situations of shared professional labor.

In Kaube’s satirical, often hilarious and consistently aggressive description of a certain type of critical “essay,” Georg Lukács’s text “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” (1911) [5] appears as the ideal—more precisely, as the ideally negative—example of all the tendencies that the writer pinpoints as the typical “imputations” ( Zumutungen ) of the essay towards its readers: “Georg Lukács […] published quite a complete list of all these imputations, (and) he did so in the form of an essay, that is as an imputation in and by itself.” The text in question does indeed not only contain the complete repertoire of all the features that Kaube identifies; Lukács also explicitly and repeatedly highlighted and used them as a basis for intellectual claims that seem to confirm Kaube’s worst nightmares. For what irritates the latter more than anything else is Lukács’s ambition to make the essay express reactions to aesthetic objects and philosophical points of view as “an attitude towards life” (“eine Stellungnahme dem Leben gegenueber”). In this understanding and self-understanding the essay indeed becomes an emblem of what Kaube believes academic work (as “science”) should strictly avoid, and this is the “literary intention” of academic disciplines to “go beyond the sheer growth of knowledge” that they can typically produce. But if the essay is not obliged to produce new knowledge and therefore remains outside any serious and seriously demanding conception of “science” (Lukács would certainly have agreed with these premises), why does Kaube so strongly condemn its adoption by Humanists? Why does he not simply ignore it—what is the danger that he senses as implicit to the genre, and whom does it threaten? Like most academics in the German-speaking world, Kaube seems to suggest that Literary Criticism only has a right to exist (and to be financed) if it adapts itself to the rigid standards of Wissenschaft . In the final sentence of his polemic, however—and perhaps un-intentionally—Kaube finally seems to allow for a non-scientific understanding of Literary Criticism when he expresses the suspicion that the essayistic form of writing might precisely “destroy the very core significance of Art and Philosophy” that it claims to lay open.

Without any doubt, Juergen Kaube’s irritation and critique are justified on at least two levels. Authors like Lukács have not only all-too readily accepted the risk of a language that makes even patient efforts of reading impossible; there is indeed reason to believe that they have often cultivated and enjoyed such impenetrability as a token of esoteric sophistication. [6] At the same time, part of the specifically humanistic genre tradition of the essay has long been accompanied by what Theodor W. Adorno described as a “well-versed” and “market-oriented superficiality.” [7] And yet it remains unclear what, especially today, could be the “core significance” of literature, art, and philosophy whose existence Kaube seems to assume as much as “rhapsodic” authors like the young Lukács do—and that at the same time he wants to protect against his past and present antagonists. As Kaube uses the word “significance” ( Bedeutung ), I imagine that he is thinking of structures of objective knowledge which can be wrested from literary texts through historical or sociological analysis—and this may well be the limit of any academic practice worthy of being subsumed under the concept of “science,” a limit that would also help to keep whatever the “significance” of literature, art, and philosophy might be, under “scientific” control.

Such a premise, however, must exclude from the academic critical endeavor the dimension of aesthetic experience as facilitated by literary texts. Now, I am not the only scholar who argues that, since only about a decade ago, contemporary Literary Criticism has shown a tendency and perhaps even a longing to recuperate the existential—and this necessarily also means the individual and the aesthetic—dimensions of reading against more objective claims. [8] From this angle, I suspect, it could be worthwhile to revisit the generic tradition of the essay in general and, more specifically, Lukács’s essay on the essay published in 1910 and 1911, a good half decade before intellectually converting to Marxism, which would become decisive for his work and his reputation as one of the most influential intellectuals of the past century.

We will never be able to reconstruct the individual origin of the ten essays on literary and philosophical authors from Lawrence Sterne to Stefan George that Lukács published as a German translation under the title Die Seele und die Formen in 1911, [9] going back to a previous Hungarian book with only eight texts, from 1910. Prior to the first book, five of these texts had come out in an intellectual journal at Budapest, whereas the two essays that Lukács added in the translated book had previously appeared in German periodicals (one of them he had written himself in German). And all we can further and more importantly assume is that they emerged from the years before 1910, which Lukács spent in Berlin, with Georg Simmel as his most important mentor and within the intellectual environment of “Life Philosophy,” after receiving his doctorate at age twenty-one from the University of Kolozsvár in the Hungarian province. The idea of bringing the texts together in a book went back to the spring of 1909 and to Lukács’s correspondence with his friend, the even younger and already renowned art critic Leo Popper. [10] Two certainties and three open problems stood at the beginning of this project: the title (“Soul and Form”) and its association with the generic form of the essay, on the side of certainties; on the other side, the question of whether the French genre-name or its Hungarian and German equivalents ( Versuch ) would be more appropriate; [11] the order in which to present the texts; and above all, the existential function of critical writing (as we would describe it today), whose discussion Lukács wanted to further.

A few weeks later, in correspondence between Lukács and Popper, concern arose whether he should dedicate the book to Irma Seidler, a painter from Budapest with whom, since 1908, Lukács had been in a profound love relation that probably “remained within the social conventions of their time.” [12] Irma Seidler’s attachment may have never matched the intensity of Lukács’s feelings, but she probably considered the possibility of getting married to him. Lukács himself, by contrast, was convinced that the institutional form and the everydayness of marriage would destroy the beauty and the life of true love, and therefore desperately—but unsuccessfully—tried to take distance. The essay “The Foundering of Form Against Life—Sören Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen” in Soul and Form was directly motivated, both in its historical empathy and in its philosophical quest, by this experience. [13] Its impact goes through several other texts as an obsession upon the incompatibility of life with institutional structures. Then, on May 18, 1911, after getting married to another man and soon having an extramarital affair, Irma Seidler took her life in Budapest, probably due to depression. Lukács dedicated the German edition of his book to her memory, [14] whereas the earlier Hungarian book version had referred to Irma Seidler with an indirect, almost distant gesture: “Into the hands of those from whom I received these texts.” [15] During the months following Irma’s death he tried to work through the existential challenge, in a text later published under the title “On Poverty of Spirit—a Conversation and a Letter.” [16]

We know about Lukács’s reactions to this dramatic time in his life from a series of diary notes that he started on April 25, 1910, and ended on May 24, 1911, six days after Irma Seidler’s suicide. [17] They show how, in the struggle between his decision to take distance and the irresistible appeal that his beloved had for him, some of the concepts and motifs of Life Philosophy made it possible to reflect upon his pain. In the process, those concepts acquired a new, often excessive emotional intensity that, without any doubt, also penetrates the essays of Soul and Form , in particular the introduction “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” written as “A Letter to Leo Popper.” Throughout the nineteenth century, Life Philosophy had left traces in Western thinking that, rather than coming together as a coherent and well-circumscribed doctrine, produced a centrifugal plurality of responses in resistance to the normative intellectual dominance of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment and German Idealism. [18] The notion of “Life”—which Lukács used synonymously with “Soul” [19] —became a common denominator of frequent allusions to an energy, as for example an energy in the thinking of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that could not be contained or tamed by rationality. Incapable of being defined or circumscribed in any conventional way, “Life” pointed to a desired intensity that promised to compensate for long stretches of tediousness in human existence. Around 1900, Henri Bergson and Wilhelm Dilthey then elaborated more explicit versions of this ubiquitous concept, drawing from the semantic apparatus of academic disciplines and traditions such as History, Psychology (Dilthey) and Biology (Bergson).

It must have been clear to Lukács, from the very first words of his diary (“How strange and exciting to begin a diary (even in my current state it affects me)”) that he mainly—if not exclusively—needed those notes in an attempt to come to terms with his passionate and desperate love for Irma Seidler. But to the degree that philosophy may have helped him gain some clarity in this difficult situation, its concepts and arguments also became more complex and more emotionally charged due to their contact with Lukács’s lived experience. This becomes visible in his note from May 8, 1910, where he straightforwardly identifies Irma with “life”: [20]

I felt it, once again at night, Irma is life. I recalled a Margaret Island [on the Danube in Budapest] excursion. Silly little things, plays. Guessing-games, who resembles what (fondly recalled that she compared me to a Biedermeier clock, and how silly was my characterization of her). And I remember this was for the first and last time in my life. […] Unless there is a contact, for contact is everything and everything is contact, nothing really happens. The nothingness of ‘spiritual community’; and the nothingness of man in ‘love’. Herein lies the productivity and freedom: to be together. . . . All is in vain! Only she exists. Even if I no longer ‘love’ her, desire her, and no longer want her back. No matter. For recalling an episode with her means more than a life spent with someone else. [21]

Besides the initial equation of Irma and Life, we can recognize in these remarks the basic form of an affective and semantic dynamic that also permeates the essays of Soul and Form . The energy of Life, for Lukács, will only come to the fore in initial, almost ephemeral “contact” with other persons. By contrast, all institutional forms (“spiritual community”) and even all types of emotional continuity (“love”) appear to be threatening and potentially stifling to the liveliness of Life. Lukács may not only have believed during those years that remembering Irma was the exclusive way in which Life could become present for him individually; he may indeed have felt, on a more general level, that memory and “recalling” was the one truly possible form of partaking in Life at all because he believed it to be the one dimension of contact with Life capable of avoiding the stifling interference of form, that is, of institutional form and of continuity as form.

“Contact,” rather than any institutional framework, appeared as the appropriate modality of exposing oneself to Life for Lukács, because Life was supposed to be bound to the temporal dimension of the present, as an “imperceptibly short moment of transition,” according to Baudelaire’s description in Peintre de la vie modern (1858). On May 11, 2010, “at night,” Lukács noted: “The moment when I am truly I is truly life, the total life. And yet the ‘moods’ that permeate the ‘whole life’ are only ‘momentary’ . . .” (29). Over thirteen months of diary entries he became increasingly obsessed with the thought of removing every possible obstacle in his relationship with Irma that could have separated or alienated him from Life in its imagined purity or ­fullness—and being obsessed, that is, reacting with hyperbolic words and feelings to anything that mattered to him, was the predominant mood in Lukács’s existence during that time.

On May 29, “at night, while working,” he played with a distinction between “the life” and “life,” similar to one that he had already used, in the almost opposite sense, for the introduction to Soul and Form . Within the diary, “life” seems to stand for “everydayness,” that is, for everything that Lukács was willing to avoid and to escape, whereas “the life” meant ecstatic immediacy:

[…] there is indeed a difference between ‘the’ life and ‘life.’ ‘The life’ washes away everything: the time, the development, the moments. And, despite everything else, ‘life’ can bring and keep together human beings, who (discounting the discountable) are empirically destined for each other. But ‘the’ life never discounts anything. It is beyond time and space. There is no forgetting, no forgiveness, no sentiment. In ‘the’ life essences make contact with essences. Therefore it is a weakness—but a necessary weakness—on my part to be able to ‘forgive’ her. (32)

Made possible by “the life,” what Lukács evokes with the formula of “essences making contact with essences” (as opposed to being “empirically destined for each other” by “life”), “naked life” so to speak, becomes central and decisive; while he seems to imply that “forgiving” Irma for abandoning him and for getting married would be a step towards a life as institutional continuity that would never be better than just livable—and thus mark a step away from Life in its absoluteness. Paradoxically, the desire for “the life,” due to the phobia of everydayness and concreteness, leads Lukács to the—practical and philosophical—conclusion that ecstatic intellectual concentration would keep him the closest to pure vitality and energy (this is a “paradoxical” conclusion because, at first glance, nothing seems to be further away from Life than ecstatic intellectual concentration).

Very much in this spirit, he writes on October 1, 1910: “Not a single day should pass without reading a few pages from a great philosopher. […] I have scattered myself, I have lived among people and involved myself in petty things. Must not do it” (37). In spite of such intentions, it is not surprising that after Irma Seidler’s death Lukács accused himself for his attitude of distance: “Perhaps I could have saved her, had I taken her hand and led her” (39). At this point, however, the motif of distance from empirical “life” to be kept as a condition for exposing oneself to the plenitude and immediacy of “the life” had long become central in Lukács’s thinking and in his emotions, as we can see in his essay on the “essay” written as an introduction to Soul and Form . This text will now be the point of reference in Lukács’s earlier writing for my attempt to find some inspiration for the present-day situation of Literary Studies.

Evoking Life Philosophy as a horizon and Georg Lukács’s relationship with Irma Seidler as a source of existential irritation and energy was more than just to provide a double contextualization for a reading of his text, “The Nature and Form of the Essay.” I needed to find some strong external orientation for an in-depth understanding, which this essay on the essay does not readily facilitate (and the orientation I was looking for lies in the discovery of Lukács’s relentless endeavor to find an immediate access opening the lived experience of Life—in German we could transcribe it as “Erlebnis des Lebens”). Juergen Kaube is certainly right: the almost deliberate conceptual inconsistency and the lack of an argumentative arch, both of which Lukács cultivated in his writing and liked to associate with the essay as a genre, make difficult—if not impossible—any immanent approach to secure only fragments of meaning, not to speak of intellectual positions or of an integral interpretation. Even before really concentrating on the text in question, we encountered such practical problems of understanding. In the notes from Lukács’s diary, for example, it became visible how the distinction between the concepts of “life” and “soul” remains fluid—and therefore turns into a permanent source of confusion.

Early on in the text, Lukács announces that he wants “to try to define the essay […] by describing it as an art form” (17), [22] precisely before he begins to distinguish it as a genre and intellectual gesture from art and from science. [23] The second distinction, the one between “art” and “science,” dominates Lukács’s opening pages, culminating in this sentence: “Science affects us by its contents, art by its forms; science offers us facts and the relationships between facts, but art offers us souls and destinies. Here the ways part; here there is no replacement and no transition” (18). Art is in contact with Life (Lukács writes: with “souls and destinies”), and art has a tendency—and a capacity—to “dissolve all its content into form.” Science ( Wissenschaft ), by contrast, dissolves Life into content, that is into concepts and knowledge. To make things even more complicated—and more precise, one has to admit—Lukács reminds his readers, a few paragraphs further down, that the distance between the dimension of Life and the dimension of concepts is not really absolute. In doing so, he proposes yet another distinction between “the life” and “Life” (“d a s Leben” and “L e b e n” on the printed page of the German text), which looks similar but is semantically different from the polarity between “life” and “the life” in his diary. This time—converging with Edmund Husserl’s contrast between “experience” ( Erfahrung ) and “lived experience” ( Erlebnis )—“the life” refers to a concept drawn from Life whereas “life” stands for a state of immediacy (the English translation does well in using “life” for “das Leben” and “living” for “Leben”). Altogether, Lukács tries to show here how “life” and “living” are ultimately and inevitably concomitant within human existence: “Elements of both are contained in the lived experience of every human being, even if in always varying degrees of depth and intensity” (21).

Now, for the German academic tradition—in which the early Lukács had been intellectually socialized— Kunst-Wissenschaft , Literatur-Wissenschaft , and their discourses lie between “art” and “science” because these disciplines and their discourses approach “art” and “literature” under the conditions of “science.” But after several attempts that do not seem to do justice to Lukács’s decisive intuition, he finally decides to describe the critical discourse as not “scientific,” that is as not dissolving art and Life into concepts, but as reaching the dimension of lived experience and, as we can safely supplement: as coming close to Life: [24]

I mean intellectuality, conceptuality as sensed experience, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle of existence; the world-view in its undisguised purity as an event of the soul, as the motive force of life. The question is posed immediately: What is life, what is man, what is destiny? But posed as a question only: for the answer, here, does not supply a “solution” like one of the answers of science or, at purer heights, those of philosophy. (22)

That an exercise of “intellectuality” and “conceptuality” can lead authors and readers to “lived experience” ( Erlebnis ) and thus to Life is the surprising, perhaps even paradoxical claim and possibility that Lukács associates with the essay as a generic form. For instead of transposing the forms of art and literature—and that would mean the Life and the soul inherent to art and literature—into concepts and questions, as science and philosophy would do, the critical essay uses form as its own “voice”:

Form is reality in the writings of critics; it is the voice with which they address their questions to life. That is the true and most profound reason why literature and art are the typical, natural subject-matter of criticism. For here the end-point of poetry can become a starting-point and a beginning; here form appears, even in its abstract conceptuality, as something surely and concretely real. But this is not the only typical subject-matter of the essay, not the sole one. For the essayist needs form only as lived experience and he needs only its life, only the living soul-reality it contains. But this reality is to be found in every immediate sensual expression of life, it can be read out of and read into every such experience. (24)

Rather than moments of convergence, fusion, and “inseparability” of soul / life and form, as Judith Butler states in her remarkable introduction to the English translation, I believe that Lukács’s main concern and, if one can say so, his main discovery, was indeed the essay’s capacity to reach Life through form as lived experience, which capacity depends on its generic potential to use form as its “voice” (in other words: on the freedom not to subordinate the urge towards a literary use of language to standards of semantic and argumentative clarity).

It is then hardly surprising that, in a beautiful and frequently quoted sentence, Lukács characterizes the intermediary—and for him so specifically productive—status of the critical essay by saying that it “strives for truth” and finds “life”: “It is true that the essay strives for truth: but just as Saul went out to look for his father’s she-asses and found a kingdom, so the essayist who is really capable of looking for the truth will find at the end of his road the goal he was looking for: life” (27).

The more difficult question, however, the question for which I do not manage to find one well circumscribed answer in Lukács’s introductory essay, lies in asking—to say it in a language different from his own—how the lived experience of Life as provided by a critical essay and the potential function of the critical essay, can become different from the function covered by art itself. Much of the text’s second part seems to struggle precisely with this problem, and Lukács may well have failed to find a solution because he so liked to indulge in the obscurity-producing openness of his own writing and thinking. Several times he seems to get stuck in trying to prove that experiencing the form of a literary text or of an artwork, as presented by a critical essay, is not more abstract (and therefore less immediate) than the experience of a form of life presented by art or literature themselves. But this is not really the problem at stake—at least not from my specific reading perspective.

The open question that one would like to see (but does not find) discussed has little to do with whether a critical essay can come as close to Life as art or literature can. Rather, it is about how the essay’s impact on the reader may be different from the impact of a literary text or an artwork. Short of finding a clear-cut solution to this problem in Lukács’s text, I would like to focus upon the recurrent motif of a specific condition of lightness that is supposed to characterize the critical essay in comparison to art and literature—Lukács refers to it with the words “humor” and “irony.” The most relevant passage begins with a statement about a function that the critical essay does not fulfill: “most people have to believe that the writings of the essayists are produced only in order to explain books and pictures, to facilitate their understanding” (25). But this, he implies, is not what the essay really does or, at least, it is not the most important function that it covers. Instead, Lukács discovers the “irony” of this genre without a stable form that lies in appearing to be so far away from what it ultimately does:

And the irony I mean consists in the critic always speaking about the ultimate problems of life, but in a tone which implies that he is only discussing pictures and books, only the inessential and pretty ornaments of real life—and even then not their innermost substance but only their beautiful but useless surface. Thus each essay appears to be removed as far as possible from life, and the distance between them seems the greater, the more burningly and painfully we sense the actual closeness of the true essay of both. (25)

It might be this “irony”—i.e. the distance from Life created by the critical essay together with a “burning” closeness—that is responsible for the acts and moments of judgment offered by it as a genre. Lukács speaks of such acts and moments towards the end of his text:

[…] an original and deep-rooted attitude toward the whole of life, a final, irreducible category of possibilities of experience. Therefore it needs not only to be satisfied (and thus abolished) but also to be given form which will redeem and release its most essential and now indivisible substance into eternal value. That is what the essay does. […] This “application” creates both that which judges and that which is judged, it encompasses a whole world in order to raise to eternity, in all its uniqueness, something that was once there. The essay is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining thing is not the verdict (as it is the case with the system) but the process of judging. (33–34)

Now, I will not venture into an interpretation of these claims in order to translate Lukács’s intuitions into coherent meaning, let alone into an overarching argument. There is no doubt that its impenetrable language is the most salient weakness of his essay on the essay—and perhaps also its most eccentric strength. It could be a strength, from our present-day perspective, if we manage to see how individual essays have entered and are still entering a dimension of intellectual life where well-shaped concepts must necessarily fail—a dimension that may still be relevant for our-self understanding as humanists, perhaps even more relevant today, a good century later, than when the text was first written and read.

In its truly outstanding entry on “Georg [György] Lukács,” the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [25] provides an indirect answer to our question about the difference between art and the critical essays while both are approaching Life in the modality of lived experience. The entry states that in his “Early Aesthetic Writings” Lukács was predominantly concerned with the ability of approaching “life’s intensity and potentiality,” and that he saw this potentiality threatened by phenomena belonging to the everyday, by phenomena remaining on a “purely symbolic and imaginary level”—and, also and more surprisingly, by the dimension of form. As he saw art as a dimension mainly constituted by form, any harmony between Life and form “achieved” through art would inevitably turn out to be “to the detriment” of Life’s intensity and potentiality. Due to its proverbial openness and due perhaps to using “voice” as a personal gestuality of writing (instead of generic form), this may indeed have been Lukács’s key intuition, that the critical essay might have the possibility to bypass what Judith Butler calls “the death drive of form” (12). Why, however, the doubling of form and gestuality in the critical essay (i.e. art and literature being constituted by form meet the critical essay using gestuality as its “voice” in approaching them), why this doubling of form and gestuality should be a strategy to avoid the Life-stifling effects of form will most likely remain Lukács’s secret forever.

And yet I agree with Adorno, in whose text “Der Essay als Form,” conceived and written between 1954 and 1955, [26] Lukács’s essay on the essay from 1910, despite occasional reservations, appears as the gold standard for identifying philosophical and critical functions of the genre. In a particularly impressive passage, Adorno implicitly suggests an explanation for the impenetrability of Lukács’s language, by comparing the relation between the essay as a genre and its conceptual environment to that of a foreigner who tries to learn and to speak the language by which he is surrounded, without ever using a dictionary or a grammar:

In the way the essay appropriates concepts, we may best compare it to the behavior of somebody who, in a foreign country, is compelled to speak its language, instead of tinkering it together from the elements offered by a language course. Such a person will read without a dictionary. Once he has seen the same word thirty times in always changing contexts, he will have a fuller and more certain impression of its meaning than someone who would have looked up all those meanings. For dictionary references are always too narrow in comparison to the versatility of meanings depending on different contexts and too imprecise in relation to those individual nuances that the context generates in each individual case. Such “learning,” however, always remains exposed to a risk of error—and so does the essay. (29) [27]

While Adorno—who may well have competed with the early Lukács on the impenetrability of their language—does not make this premise explicit, it seems safe to assume that the “foreign language” to which the essay can expose itself and for which it tries to find tentative concepts (always with the “risk of error”) is an image for situations which, different from language, do not allow for an appropriation through concepts. [28] Retranslated into the words of the early Lukács, we could say that, by exposing itself to Life—more precisely: to art and literature as traces of Life—the essay tries to wrest concepts from that which resists conceptualization. Like Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno also believes that the lived experience of Life’s intensity can only occur in the transitory time of a moment, of a moment of epiphany in which things seem to show themselves and become fully present, a moment, also, that will well compensate for any investment and even redeem eternity. To describe this intuition, Adorno uses two sentences from Nietzsche’s Will to Power :

Let us assume that we said “Yes” to a single moment, then we will have said “Yes” not only to ourselves but to all existence. For nothing just stands for itself, neither in us nor in the things of the world: and if our soul has only once vibrated and resonated with happiness like a chord, then all eternities were necessary to make this event possible—and all eternities were blessed, redeemed, justified and affirmed in this single moment of us saying “Yes.” (49) [29]

Intensity, immediacy and suddenness [30] are probably the three dimensions today that we relate the most closely with aesthetic experience—a concept that was less frequently used a hundred years ago than now, although it could have been perfectly pertinent for Lukács’s reflections about art, literature, and the essay. At the beginning of my essay, reacting to Kaube’s critique of the essay in the name of Wissenschaft , I had briefly mentioned the impression that a certain return from more “socially” or “politically” motivated endeavors to a concentration on (art and literature as a potential for) aesthetic experience may have characterized the past two decades in academic criticism. This return, I think, has been motivated by a longing for intensity—which I identify as that “key significance” for literature, art, and even philosophy in our time to which Kaube was alluding without naming it. The growing desire for intensity, finally, could follow from a global everyday environment in which contingency and randomness, distance and the impression that nothing can be immediately present, have indeed become universal. If the now past world of Modernity had presented itself as a field of contingency and relativity, as a field of contingency between what appears necessary and what appears possible, this existential situation, partly but not exclusively due to innovations and changes in our technological environment, [31] now finds itself in a process of transformation where both what used to be impossible and what used to be necessary are becoming “just possible.” [32]

That such an existential situation without contours creates a desire, a nostalgic desire perhaps, to feel and to hold on to an environment of intensity—and if it were only for a moment—may suffice to explain our renewed need for aesthetic experience. But why should we use the essay—in all of its now unfolded complexity and with all of its uncertainties—as a medium to bring us closer to aesthetic experience? Why should we not simply and exclusively expose ­ourselves—and above all, our students—to the canon of great works of art, literature, and philosophy? And why do we not seek intensity in new challenges of our existence—besides art, literature, and philosophy?

Of course confrontation with such challenges and non-mediated contact with objects of aesthetic experience is still—and will always remain—possible. But to expose ourselves to the challenges of the present, including the thought of a possible ending of humankind as a vanishing point that has all of a sudden begun to appear realistic, may simply be too much and too overwhelming for most of us. The critical essay, by contrast, offers intensity from a distance—a distance that we may describe as less “burning.” This is quite obviously one of its virtues. But as a trace of individual resonance and reaction to aesthetic experience, it also points [33] in two other directions: to the existence of intensity as a potential and as a fact, so to speak, inviting those who are not familiar with it; and also to idiosyncratic ways, mostly non-rational idiosyncratic ways, of reacting to it. This longing for Life must be the ground that our present shares with the situation and the work of the young Georg Lukács, especially with his fascination for the essay as a genre; the historical difference may be that, if such desire for Life was a sign of intellectual sophistication after 1900, it appears to be part of a global condition today.

My interest in Georg Lukács, especially in his earlier work, was first awakened by Pal Kelemen and Amalia Kerekes. Without the inspiring enthusiasm of these Hungarian friends and without a visit to the house in Budapest where Lukács spent the later years of his life, I would not have dared to (firstly speak and then) write about the topic of this essay, i.e. the essay as a genre in Lukács’s thinking and practice as an author. Thanks also to my eminent Stanford colleague (and beloved neighbor) Denise Gigante for her invitation—and, above all, for her angelical patience.

Cover graphics by Michelle Jia; image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4963780944

See L.Cerny, “Essay,” in Historisches Woerterbuch der Philosophie , vol. 2, eds. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1972), 746–49, here 746.  ↩

Heinz Schlaffer, “Essay,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft , vol. 1, eds. Klaus Weimar et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 523–25, here 523ff.  ↩

A sociologist in the Weberian tradition by training, Kaube is the editor of the weekly supplement on the Humanities and Arts (“Geisteswissenschaften”) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Germany’s most intellectually influential daily newspaper. He also regularly teaches for several departments in the Humanities at the universities in Bielfeld and in Heidelberg.  ↩

“Der Essay als Freizeitform von Wissenschaft,” in Merkur—deutsche Zeitschrift fuer europpaeisches Denken 776 (2014), 57–61.  ↩

The text was originally written in Lukács’s native Hungarian language and served as an introduction to seven other essays by him, first published in 1910 in Budapest. While there is no hope of fully reconstructing the philological details involved, it seems almost certain today that Lukács had a number of friends translate these (and at least one of two additional) essays for a German publication that appeared a year later: Die Seele und die Formen: Essays (Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co, 1911). (The German title of the introductory text is “Ueber Form und Wesen des Essays.”) See Thomas von Ahn and Hans-Harald Mueller, “Georg Lukács’s ‘Ueber Wesen und Form des Essays’: Philologische und narrative Analyse einer Selbstthematsierung des Essays.” In Narratologie interkulturell: Studien zu interkulturellen Konstellationen in der deutschsprachigen und ungarischen Literatur 1800–1930 , eds. Tom Kindt and Katalin Teller. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2005), 49–77. I will quote Lukács from the English translation of the German book version: Soul and Form , trans. by Anna Bostock, eds. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, with an introduction by Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).  ↩

After reading Lukács’s essays in the first Hungarian manuscript version, for example, his friend Leo Popper commented with approval and enthusiasm: “That these essays are of a lyrical character will become clear to their readers by the sheer fact that they cannot understand them” (see von Ahn and Mueller, 53).  ↩

Theodor W. Adorno, “Der Essay als Form,” in Noten zur Literatur , vol. 1. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), 9–49, especially 14ff.  ↩

For further references, see my article “Warum wir Klassiker brauchen. Ideengeschichten aus dem Kalten Krieg,” in Zeitschrift fuer Ideengeschichte (2010), 111-20, and “Klassiker anders, heute,” in Kanon und Bestenlisten : Was gilt in der Kultur? Was zaehlt fuer Deutschlands Nachbarn? , eds. Bertholt Franke et al. (Goettingen: Vandenhoek, 2012), 53–66.  ↩

This is the conclusion at which von Ahn’s and Mueller’s well-informed investigation arrives. For more details regarding the publishing history, see the survey in the same article (66) and my previous footnote 5.  ↩

A compact selection of Popper’s writings (with an excellent epilogue) is available in the German original under the title Schwere und Abstraktion: Versuche (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1987).  ↩

Popper was in favor of the German translation ( Versuche )—and it is therefore appropriate that the collection of his texts from 1987 (see footnote 10) uses this word in its title.  ↩

Von Ahn and Mueller, 64.  ↩

See the emphasis on the relationship with Irma Seidler as decisive for the essays of Seele und Form in Judith Butler’s introduction to the English translation of Soul and Form , 11ff.  ↩

“Dem Andenken Irma Seidlers”  ↩

My friend Amalia Kerekes suggests that this phrase may go back to a proposal from Leo Popper that could have made the reference to Irma Seidler less oblique: “In die Haende sei dieses Buch gelegt, die mir es gaben” (“In the hands that gave it to me this book may be placed”).  ↩

Available as a supplement to the English translation, 210–14.  ↩

Regarding the intellectual and emotional life of the young Georg Lukács, above all his relationship with Irma Seidler, no other book or article that I consulted can compete with the density of historical detail and the depth of understanding offered by Thomas Harrison in 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997), especially 88–90, 189–90.  ↩

See G. Pflug, “Lebensphilosophie,” in Historisches Woerterbuch der Philosophie , vol. 5, eds. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1986), 135-40.  ↩

In doing so, he probably relied on the tradition arising from ancient philosophy and strengthened by medieval theology that applied “anima” both to the spiritual and bodily dimensions of human life as inseparable.  ↩

About the concept of “Life” in the early work of Lukács, see Harrison, 99–100, 194.  ↩

Quoted (including the remarks in square brackets) after The Lukács Reader , ed. Arpad Kadarkay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 28 (the Diary is 26–41).  ↩

The wording of the German text may suggest that this was only an initial and therefore transitory strategy: “Ich versuche den Essay so scharf wie ueberhaupt moeglich zu isolieren eben dadurch, dass ich ihn jetzt als Kunstform bezeichne.” On the final page of his text, Lukács indeed comes explicitly back to the early “definition” of the essay as an art form, and now underlines that it both is and is not an artform: “Jetzt erst klaenge es nicht widerspruchsvoll, doppelsinnig und wie eine Verlegenheit, ihn ein Kunstwerk zu nennen und doch fortwaehrend das ihn von der Kunst Unterscheidende hervorzuheben: er steht dem Leben mit der gleichen Gebaerde gegenueber wie das Kunstwerk, doch nur die Gebaerde, die Souveraenitaet dieser Stellungnahme kann die gleiche sein, sonst gibt es zwischen ihnen keine Beruehrung” (“Only now would it not be contradictory, ambiguous and false to call it a work of art and yet insist on emphasizing the thing that differentiates it from art: it faces life with the same gesture as the work of art, but only the gesture, the sovereignty of its attitude is the same; otherwise there is no correspondence between them”).  ↩

Adorno in “Der Essay als Form” (12ff.) noted and criticized this inconsistency, despite his great appreciation for Lukács’s text—but without taking into account the explanation on the final page.  ↩

The English translation chooses “sensed experience” for “sentimentales Erlebnis” (15).  ↩

Stahl, Titus, “Georg [György] Lukács,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/lukacs.  ↩

According to the edition of his Noten zur Literatur , vol. 1, 196.  ↩

My translation.  ↩

This becomes clear only towards the end of Adorno’s text where he says that the essay “wants to break open with concepts what cannot be adapted to concepts and what betrays, through the contradiction into which it gets entangled, that the pretended network of its objectivity is a purely subjective process” (48).  ↩

Adorno quotes from: Der Wille zur Macht , vol. 2. Werke , vol. 10 (Leipzig, 1906), 206 (paragraph 1032). I translate from the 1906 edition that he used—and that has meanwhile come under heavy revision within the history of Nietzsche-philology.  ↩

This concept is irreversibly connected to the life work of Karl Heinz Bohrer, Germany’s most sophisticated and most prolific thinker in the field of aesthetic experience. Unfortunately, only a small selection from his writing is available in English, as Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).  ↩

See Robert Pogue Harrison’s blog, “The Children of Silicon Valley,” in the New York Review of Books , July 17, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/17/children-silicon-valley.  ↩

My book Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), esp. 73–79, is dedicated to a first description of this situation.  ↩

In the final chapter of The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 68–87, I have tried to describe similar perspectives as “deictic” functions of criticism.  ↩

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English that goes straight to the heart

Essay on Literature and Life

An essay is a piece of writing that revolves around a particular theme and contains the academic opinions of the person writing it.

A basic essay mainly consists of three parts: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.

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Literature influences life no less than life influences literature (Essay)

Literature is the representation of life through language. Literature expresses the truth of life. According to Matthew Arnold, literature is, “a criticism of life”. Literature is the record of the writer’s impressions and reactions to the real life around him in human society.

The writer of literature must come into the intimate reality of life and transform what he sees or feels in life into a work of art through his secondary imagination, feelings and expressive language. A work of literature is not one of the abstractions. These real-world men and women have a basis in real life.

Literature embraces all those aspects of life which are of eternal interest to men. Literature is an imaginative representation or interpretation of life. Literature originates from life and is closely related to life. Literature separated from life is not literature at all.

Life is the stuff of which literature is made and the true literary artist, gifted by God with his faculty of vision and imagination, transforms the bare and raw truth of life into things of beauty. So great literature not only gives aesthetic pleasure but also stimulates, uplifts, uplifts and uplifts the mind with food for thought.

Literature greatly influences life. Great and sublime literature enlivens and uplifts life. It stimulates thought, elevates the mind and gives aesthetic pleasure. Literature refreshes and invigorates the mind. Bad and decadent literature easily and quickly affects the human mind though it has no permanent place in the world of art. Bad literature suppresses the good qualities and virtues of man and evokes vice and animality. Bad literature cannot stand the test of time and eventually fades away.

Classic literature and epic poetry like Illiad and Odyssey, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, etc. influence and inspire life till modern times and will influence life in future times also. Characters in Shakespeare’s plays always influence the lives of men. The study of literature brings men in touch with and makes men live habitually with the wise thoughts and right feelings of literary artists of all ages. In the word of W. Whitman literature “frees, arouses and dilutes the human mind,” So it can be concluded that life influences literary artists to create literature and literature influences the life of men to shape it properly.

Classic literature and epics such as Iliad and Odyssey , Aeneid, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost etc. have influenced and inspired life till modern times and will continue to influence life in the future. The characters in Shakespeare’s plays always influence men’s lives. The literary study brings men into contact with and habitually lives men with the wise thoughts and right feelings of literary artists of all ages. In the words of W. Whitman, literature “frees, arouses and dilutes the human mind” so it can be concluded that life influences literary artists to produce literature, and literature influences men’s lives to shape them properly.

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Essay on Literature In Our Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Literature In Our Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Literature In Our Life

Introduction to literature.

Literature is a big part of our lives. It includes books, poems, plays, and other writings. We use literature to learn, to feel emotions, and to understand other cultures and times. It helps us to think and to grow.

The Importance of Literature

Literature is important because it lets us see the world in new ways. By reading, we can experience other people’s lives and feelings. This can make us more understanding and kind. It can also inspire us to do great things.

Literature and Education

In school, we read a lot of literature. This helps us to learn about language, history, and science. It also helps us to improve our thinking skills. By reading, we can become smarter and more knowledgeable.

Literature and Entertainment

Literature is also a great way to have fun. We can enjoy exciting stories, funny poems, and interesting plays. This can make us happy and relaxed. It can also help us to be more creative and imaginative.

In conclusion, literature is a very important part of our lives. It helps us to learn, to feel, to understand, and to enjoy. So, let’s keep reading and enjoying literature!

250 Words Essay on Literature In Our Life

What is literature.

Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. It includes books, poems, plays, and other written works. Literature is a mirror of society, showing us the world and our place within it.

Role of Literature in Our Life

Literature plays a key role in our life. It can entertain us, make us think, or even make us cry. It is a way for us to experience different cultures, times, and places. Reading literature can help us understand other people’s feelings and viewpoints.

Learning from Literature

Literature is a great teacher. It can teach us about history, science, art, and so much more. By reading books, we can learn about different parts of the world, different ways of life, and different ideas. This can help us become more open-minded and understanding.

Expression through Literature

Literature is also a way for us to express our feelings and ideas. When we write, we can share our thoughts and emotions with others. This can help us feel understood and connected to other people.

In conclusion, literature is a vital part of our life. It helps us understand the world around us, learn new things, and express our feelings. So, let’s keep reading and writing to grow and learn more about the world.

500 Words Essay on Literature In Our Life

Introduction.

Literature plays a crucial role in our lives. It is more than just words written on a page. It is a mirror that reflects society, a window that allows us to look into different worlds, and a tool to teach us about life.

The Power of Stories

From the time we are small, we are told stories. These tales, whether they are from books, movies, or our family members, help us understand the world. They teach us about good and bad, right and wrong. They show us different ways of living and thinking. In this way, literature helps us learn about ourselves and others.

Learning from Characters

In literature, we meet many characters. Some are brave, some are wise, and some are just like us. These characters face problems, make decisions, and learn lessons. By reading about their experiences, we too can learn. We can see how they handle situations and what results from their actions. This can guide us in our own lives.

Exploring Different Worlds

Literature also takes us to places we may never visit in real life. Through books, we can travel to distant lands, explore outer space, or even visit magical worlds. This not only entertains us but also expands our understanding of the world. It opens our minds to new ideas and possibilities.

Understanding Society

Literature reflects society. It shows us the customs, beliefs, and problems of different cultures and times. By reading literature, we can learn about history and social issues. This can help us understand why things are the way they are today. It also teaches us empathy as we read about the experiences of different people.

Improving Language Skills

Reading literature improves our language skills. It introduces us to new words and phrases. It shows us how to express our thoughts and feelings in a beautiful and effective way. This can help us in our studies and in our daily communication.

In conclusion, literature is a vital part of our lives. It teaches us, entertains us, and opens our minds. It helps us understand ourselves, others, and the world. So, let’s keep reading and let literature enrich our lives.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Literature Essay

Some would say that literature has been the foundation of life. It has the ability to emphasize worldly issues and human cataclysm. These are written in paragraphs that makes our minds imagine things based on what the context is showing us. It enables every individual to see what others may perceive and even make other living being like animals and plants to be characters of a particular piece. Literature provided each one a chance to catch a lesson about life experiences from the tragic stories to the happiest one.

In this article, we will be going to talk about literature essay . As we have known, all essays follows the same structure which is the introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion. Writing an essay would not require much as long as you are able to comply with what is being required. See examples of other essays like expository essay , narrative essay and more.

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11. Basic Literature Essay

What is a Literature Essay?

A literature essay is an academic work that is written commonly with the existence of literature writings or piece or an analysis. It may examine or evaluate a particular literary work. It also tells about the theme of it. Literary essays maybe all about any writings such as books or anything related to literature.

This type of paper needs a particular format to follow. When engaging yourself with an academic writing , you also have to maintain a specific writing style. You can’t write like a journalist or a blogger. All you have to be is an essay writer that reads various literary books to create a literature essay for your target readers.

Basically, you have to follow some steps that will help you achieve a good literary essay. You have to understand the purpose of a literary analysis and its format, create a plan with regards to your writing activity, begin to write and don’t forget to edit in case there are possible errors that needs certain changes.

Also, consider this elements that would help your essay be organized. Know your subject, the form, your writing style, the theme, the relationship between the form and content and the main plot and subplot, the characters’ strengths and weaknesses and the storyline strengths and weaknesses.

How to Start your Literature Essay?

It is better to be aware of all the elements and structure an essay should include. It will be much easier for you to begin with your literary essay outline . The question now is “how do you start?”

In your introduction, it is always your goal to grab the attention of your readers. Bring the focus to the main point or main idea of your essay. You may also start with using a quote from a famous author. You are also allowed to put some background information about the literary piece you are analyzing. Don’t forget to include a thesis statement to maintain clarity within your work.

How to End your Literature Essay?

Every essay needs a strong conclusion. This should be able to convince all of your readers. How do you write a conclusion of your essay?

Do not try to attempt introducing new ideas in your conclusion. The main role of your conclusion is to give a summary and a restatement of your main ideas. It could also be making necessary comments that is in lined with your perspective.

What is the minimum number of paragraphs in an essay?

Normally, essays would usually have a minimum of three to four paragraphs.

In writing a literature essay, what should your title indicate?

Your title should indicate what you mostly focus on. It is best to keep it concise as possible.

Where do we usually put out topic sentence?

Topic sentences should be placed at the beginning of your paragraph.

Writing a literary essay is not an easy thing to do. You have to keep your focus on the main idea and at the same time fill in the necessary contents needed in every outline. As we grow older, we begin to discover every good aspect a literature has and what makes it special.

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Andrew Marvell pp 1–7 Cite as

Introduction: A Literary Life?

• Matthew C. Augustine 2  
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Part of the book series: Literary Lives ((LL))

This introductory chapter asks what it means to live a literary life and what it means to write one, specifically, what it means to write one for the poet Andrew Marvell in view of the approaching four hundredth anniversary of his birth. Surveying modern criticism and biography of Marvell, the chapter argues for a rebalancing of the terms ‘poet’ and ‘politician’ in the scholar’s brief.

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The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Death is one of the inevitable aspects of life, and all human beings will go through the process at some point in their life. Although death physically separates individuals from their family and friends for good, it can be motivational. It can be the reason to live well with others, do good to anyone, a reason to correct yourself, and stay healthy always. Human beings do not like death, but it gives a sense of awareness that the end is the same; what matters is how one spends their life Death is a powerful force, and it may be the only thing on the earth that can change the world (Vajta 24). Devastating as it may seem, death has a surprising amount of power. It is the only thing over which human beings have no control. If it is the time for a person to die, they will die; nothing can change it.

Death is the most agonizing experience when it involves the people you cherish. When a loved one passes away, people are left wondering why it happened and trying to ignore the same. It is normal to be filled with resentment, wondering why you were not able to be there with them. Instead of dwelling on the fact that they are no longer alive, a mature person accepts the conclusion and considers what they would want you to do in their honor if a loved one passes away. You will be able to utilize death as a motivator if you approach it with an open mind. When one is about to give up, they will hear the voice of their departed loved one telling them not to worry. Typically, no human is ready to die, and most people wish to live forever, and that is why it is essential to cherish all moments. This essay will explore the significance of death in the human experience of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , the poem I heard a Fly Buzz – When I died, and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery. These works give a more understanding of the theme of death from different perspectives.

The story of Hamlet is centered on an important topic that depicts a never-ending emotional conflict. In the story, death permeates every scene, from the opening scene’s confrontation with the Ghost of a dead man to the final scene’s carnage, which claims the lives of nearly every significant character (Shakespeare 1-206). There are many deaths in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but his fascination with death and the Ghost of King Hamlet is visible in his depiction of the issue.

Hamlet is perpetually preoccupied with death and contemplates it from a variety of angles. While the idea of self-harm fascinates and repulses him, he is equally entranced by death’s physical reality, as evidenced by the famous gravedigger scene (Shakespeare 20). The play Hamlet can be viewed as a long conversation between Hamlet and death. The more Hamlet grows as a character throughout the play, the more he comes into contact with various viewpoints on mortality and death and how they relate to Hamlet and others.

The character initially regards life as a torturous prelude to death and the afterlife, but as he grows and learns more about himself, the considerable toll death takes on humankind dawns on him. Through these characters, the playwright reveals his ambivalent take on the central issue. Hamlet idolizes death as a teenager from the beginning of the play, and he lives his life as if it were a journey to the grave (Shakespeare 1-205). Despite his apprehensions, he makes an effort to get in touch with the Ghost. Hamlet is terrified of dying since he doesn’t know what will happen once he passes away. In a well-known soliloquy, Hamlet expresses his concern about death and engages in a conversation about it. While confronted with murder, injustice, and the end of his life, Hamlet appears callous toward death. Hamlet contemplates death and the afterlife as part of his desire for vengeance in Shakespeare’s play. However, Hamlet’s plans to exact revenge on his father are merely a prelude to his eventual consideration of suicide. As William Shakespeare portrays with veiled mockery, his obsession with death slowly drives him insane.

For example, when Hamlet murders Ophelia’s father, he loses sight of where he buried his body, leading him to rage about the horrible things that happen to dead bodies after they are eaten. Because Hamlet was obsessed with death and his black clothing, Shakespeare had him appear depressed. With Shakespeare’s graveyard scene, we get a better sense of Hamlet’s concern with death. The picture of a graveyard appears several times in the play, revealing the character’s attitude toward dying. Only Hamlet is unnerved and saddened by seeing the grave because death is seen as a threat to him. Because he is preoccupied with death, Hamle t has little regard for life, including his own.

God’s ways are inscrutable, in reference to O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Hard to Find . According to the author, the most important ideas are about living a meaningless life, dying without any achievement, and the possibility of revelation. As she tells a basic, and at times hilarious, story about everyday people and prejudices and narrow-mindedness, she reveals how modern life is devoid of spirituality. To raise awareness about this issue, the author wrote the book. On the subject of location and genre, it’s important to remember that this is a “road story,” which implies a journey from one place to another on an individual level.

However, the narrative’s symbolic level is formed by a concealed meaning that is always there behind the scenes. For the most part, it is clear that the roads represent life’s journey and that everyone who takes them experiences some mental and spiritual metamorphosis. Flannery O’Connor’s writings are similar in this regard. It’s a scenic drive from Georgia to Florida with views like this: “Stone Mountain and the blue granite. “There was Stone Mountain, which had blue granite outcroppings on both sides of the road, as well as vivid red clay banks with purple striations, as well as diverse crops that formed rows of green lacework on the mountain’s sides. Even the ugliest of the trees glistened in the silver-white sunlight that drenched them.” family grandmother, including her son Bailey and his family, are in the backseat of the car as they drive through picturesque countryside, not paying any attention to it (O’Connor 13). Nobody else seems interested, except for the elderly lady who has a nostalgic attachment to “things as they used to be” and believes that travel can be educational for young people

Death comes unexpectedly most times, and no one knows the day. During their vacation, the family stumbles into a car accident in a remote location and is then murdered by a gang known as the Misfit. A transition from life to death occurs externally as a result of this. The internal movement, on the other hand, is from end to life. This implication is most prominently emphasized by the novel’s Grandmother figure, who is unnamed. Her inability to give herself a name shows that she is a typical contemporary product lacking originality. As soon as we meet her, we notice that she’s intelligent, cunning, and self-centered. In her mind, “people are not as good as they used to be,” a phrase that is both her life motto and a reflection of how she views herself; she clings to the past with bitterness. As a result, she has a false sense of self-worth and values. An incredible metamorphosis takes place after meeting the Misfit and feeling like her life is on the edge of ending.

Interestingly, her epiphany arrives via a religious dialogue with a serial killer rather than the typical route (O’Connor 20). As a side effect, this implies that the author has more wisdom than the average person. The Misfit is a strange character, and his name stands for the universal feelings of isolation, loss, and emptiness. They do not belong in the world that was created for them by God. And, contrary to what Grandmother assumed, the problem is not that individuals have aged and become less attractive. Humans see themselves reflected in the environment around them and the people they interact with. There is not much distance between the assassin and the well-dressed elderly woman who does it to look the part in case she is killed in an accident. They grew up in nonspiritual households; therefore, they didn’t have a personal relationship with God. The Misfit is aware of this, while the grandmother is unaware of it. To avoid being discovered, she hides behind Christian stereotypes such as regular church attendance, prayer, and not robbing law-abiding citizens, among others.

Conversely, Emily Dickson brings the theme of death in her works by showing how the fear of death follows from the fear of life. Her poem “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died ” presented death as quick and painless. The poem then alludes to death’s most terrible aspect as a result of this seemingly simple explanation. Initially, she gives the fly as innocuous and little more than a slight annoyance to the narrator, but in the last verse, she shows off the fly’s truly nasty side. There is a funeral in the poem, and the setting’s symbolic nature is used to depict the narrator’s mental separation in a figurative way (Dickson 4-7). They are used as a metaphor for the poet’s agony, which is expressed through the mourners. As they go, they are putting literal pressure on her, and it would not let up until she falls unconscious.

To conclude, death should serve as an additional motivation to live a better life in every moment. After all, humans should be aware that whatever occurs after they die will be very different from what they are accustomed to in their lifetime. Though dwelling on mortality all of the time is fruitless, reflecting on the finite nature of our time may be beneficial. From this perspective, the only goal that should be pursued is avoiding feeling bad about their acts. The three works present death in a special manner. Normally, human beings do not like talking about death rather than about life. Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.

Dickinson, Emily, and Petra Press. I heard a fly buzz when I died . Petra Press, 2006.

O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find: And Other Stories . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Ainsworth, 1902.

Vajta, Katharina. “Identity beyond death: messages and meanings in Alsatian cemeteries.” Mortality 26.1 (2021): 17-35.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2022, November 23). The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-concept-of-death-in-literature-and-human-life/

"The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life." IvyPanda , 23 Nov. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-concept-of-death-in-literature-and-human-life/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life'. 23 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life." November 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-concept-of-death-in-literature-and-human-life/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life." November 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-concept-of-death-in-literature-and-human-life/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Concept of Death in Literature and Human Life." November 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-concept-of-death-in-literature-and-human-life/.

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