A History of English Autobiography

Adam Smyth is the A. C. Bradley-J. C. Maxwell Tutorial Fellow in English Literature and University Lecturer in the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010) and 'Profit and Delight': Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682, and coeditor, with Gill Partington, of Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary.

'Adam Smyth's revelatory history of the genre … told … in new ways, and with fresh examples …' Thomas Keyer, London Review of Books

• 1. Introduction: the range, limits and potentials of the form Adam Smyth; 2. Medieval life-writing: types, encomia, exemplars, patterns Barry Windeatt; 3. Autobiographical selves in the poetry of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate David Matthew; 4. The radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography Molly Murray; 5. Inscribing the early modern self: the materiality of autobiography Kathleen Lynch; 6. Writing and revolution: civil war lives Suzanne Trill; 7. Money, accounting and life-writing, 1600–1700: balancing a life Adam Smyth; 8. Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper Tessa Whitehouse; 9. 'Written by herself': British women's autobiography in the eighteenth century Robert Folkenflik; 10. The lives of things: objects, it-narratives and fictional autobiography, 1700–1800 Lynn Festa; 11. Empiricist philosophers and eighteenth-century autobiography John Richetti; 12. Working-class autobiography in the nineteenth century David Vincent; 13. Romantic life-writing Duncan Wu; 14. Nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography: Carlyle, Mill, Newman Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen; 15. Emerging selves: the autobiographical impulse in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Annie Wood Besant Carol Hanbery MacKay; 16. Victorian artists' autobiographies: transgression, res gestae and the collective life Julie Codell; 17. Victorian print culture: periodicals and serial lives, 1830–60 Stephen Colclough; 18. 'Fusions and interrelations': family members of Henry James, Edmund Gosse and others Max Saunders; 19. Queer lives: Wilde, Stein, Sackville-West, Woolf, Doolittle Georgia Johnston; 20. Anecdotal remembrance: forms of First and Second World War life-writing Hope Wolf; 21. Experiments in form: modernism and autobiography in Woolf, Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce and Dorothy Richardson Laura Marcus; 22. Psychoanalysis and autobiography Maud Ellman; 23. Poetry and autobiography in the 1930s: Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, Spender Michael O'Neill; 24. Documenting lives: mass observation, women's diaries and everyday modernity Nick Hubble; 25. Postcolonial autobiography in English: the example of Trinidad Bart Moore-Gilbert; 26. Around 2000: memoir as literature Joseph Brooker; 27. Illness narratives Neil Vickers; 28. Breaking the pact: contemporary autobiographical diversions Roger Luckhurst; 29. The machines that write us: social media and the evolution of the autobiographical impulse Andreas Kitzmann.