Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction

Abstract

The introduction outlines how writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have extended the range of the biographical through formal innovations commonly associated with the fictional mode. It discusses the centrality of the fact/fiction dichotomy for an understanding of experimentation with auto/biographical form and its ethical implications. Distinguishing between experiments that negate and those that expand the premises of auto/biography, it surveys a range of generic terms from the field of life-writing research and examines the textual levels on which experiments have been conducted in modern auto/biographical narratives, also addressing the historicity of auto/biographical experimentation. The introduction concludes by outlining the individual chapters in the collection.