Martine Watson Brownley is Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory University. Allison B. Kimmich is assistant director of the Women Involved in Living and Learning (WILL) program at the University of Richmond.

This volume provides an invaluable introduction to the history of criticism on autobiography and gender, and an overview of the major critical debates in the field today. The editors have selected some of the most important articles on the autobiographical tradition, the theory of women's autobiography, the question of genre and sample texts from early and modern autobiography. Thsi volume will help to orient scholars who are either newly considering the field of lifewriting, or those teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on women's autobiography.

• Part 1 I Women's Lifewriting and the (Male) Autobiographical TraditionChapter 2 The Female Self Engendered: Autobiographical Writing and Theories of SelfhoodChapter 3 Women's Autobiographical Writings: New FormsChapter 4 Construing Truth in Lying Mouths: Truthtelling in Women's AutobiographyChapter 5 Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority in Victorian Women Writers' AutobiographiesChapter 6 Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick DouglassPart 7 II Theorizing the Female Subject: Who Writes, How, and Why?Chapter 8 Reading for the Doubled Discourse of American Women's AutobiographyChapter 9 Woman as Other, Other as Author, Author as . . . Man? The Authobiographical Dimension of The Second SexChapter 10 Beneath the Mask: Autobiographies of Japanese-American WomenPart 11 III Rethinking Genre: Autobiography in Other FormsChapter 12 Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female AutobiographyChapter 13 Autopathography: Women, Illness, and LifewritingPart 14 Women's Autobiography from the Early Modern Period to the Present: Sample TextsChapter 15 Seventeenth Century: From A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and LifeChapter 16 Eighteenth Century: From A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte CharkeChapter 17 Nineteenth Century: From Incidents in the Life of a Slave GirlChapter 18 Twentieth Century: From All o fa Piece: A Life with Multiple Sclerosis