Life Writing and Space

Eveline Kilian is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Hope Wolf is Lecturer in British Modernist Literature at the University of Sussex, UK.

Studies into life writing are a growing field of creative-critical inquiry, and Eveline Killian and Hope Wolf have produced a remarkable addition to existing scholarship. Life Writing and Space brings together a mix of established names and up and coming talent who probe the narration of lives through the prism of space. Drawing on work ranging from cultural critics to hardcore (postmodern) theorists and philosophers, this ambitious volume carves out a new territory for scholars and students interested in the intricacies of (auto)biography. Killian and Wolf's Introduction is exemplary: a work of rigorous and original scholarship that sets the bar very high. The individual contributions are varied, yet each in their own way illuminates the spatial aspects of life writing in new ways. Sebastian Groes, University of Roehampton, UKOpening itself to multiple resonances of spatial concepts, Life Writing and Space draws on literary criticism, cultural studies, and critical geographies to show how places and spaces are imagined, produced, and experienced through auto/biographical practices. This richly intertextual study demonstrates the productive potential of framing lives in terms of spatiality and explores different topologies and tropologies of life writing. Eva C. Karpinski, York University, Canada and author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, Translation

• The Spatial Dimensions of Life Writing (Eveline Kilian and Hope Wolf)PART I: RELOCATING AND REIMAGINING THE SELF 1. Multiple Occupancy: Residency and Retrospection in Trollope’s Orley Farm and An Autobiography(Matthew Ingleby)2. Lost Cities and Found Lives: The ‘Geographical Emotions’ of Bryher and Walter Benjamin(Andrew Thacker)3. Hilary Mantel and the Space of Life Writing(Neil Vickers)PART II: TRAVERSING SPACES AND TEXTS 4. Literary Configurations of the Peripatetic(Helga Schwalm)5. ‘The mystery-magic of foreignness’: Mr Isherwood Changes Places (Eveline Kilian)6. Critical Topographies in Depression Era Lives(Martin Klepper and Alexandra Wagner)PART III: CONTESTED SPACES, PRECARIOUS LIVES 7. Postcolonial Literary Cartography: Writing the Self in Contemporary Algeria(Elizabeth H. Jones)8. Inhabiting the In-Between: (Mis)placing Identity in Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks(Kathrin Tordasi)9. Isaac Rosenberg’s Life in Letters: Between the ‘coil of circumstance’ and a ‘place for poetry’(Anne-Julia Schoen)PART IV: SPACE AND THE FORM OF LIFE WRITING 10. Spaces of Intervention: Hélène Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint(Frédéric Regard)11. Strandlines: Eccentric Stories, Thoroughfare Poetics and the Future of the Archive (Hope Wolf)12. The Columbus of the Near-at-Hand: The Author as Traveller through the Everyday(James Attlee)13. There’s No Space Like Home(Clare Brant)