Life Writing as World Literature

Helga Lenart-Cheng is Professor at Saint Mary's College of California, USA. Her recent book, Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age (2022), combines cultural studies and critical media theory.Ioana Luca is Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Her work focuses on life writing, Eastern European-US connections, and memory studies.

• AcknowledgementsLife Writing and World Literature: IntroductionHelga Lenart-Cheng, Saint Mary’s College of California, USA, and Ioana Luca, National Taiwan Normal University, TaiwanPart I: Frames of Reading1. Collection, Connection, Translation, Comparison: The Provocations of Life Writing as World LiteratureJohn David Zuern, University of Hawai'i Manoa, USA2. Auto/biographical Comics in World Literature: Gaps and SilencesJulie Rak, University of Alberta, Canada3. Life Writing and Citational Justice in the Context of World LiteratureKim Rostan, Wofford College, USA Part II: From Local Traditions to Global Concerns5. An African in the World: Noni Jabavu's Memoirs as World LiteratureAthambile Masola, University of Cape Town, South Africa6. "A Writer of the World": Peter Abrahams's Autobiographical Texts, South Africa, and World LiteratureMarta Fossati, University of Milan, Italy7. Rock-Star, Comedian, "Working Class Man": Popular Memoir and Celebrity Migrant Life Writing in Contemporary AustraliaJacqui Dickin and Kylie Cardell, Flinders University, Australia8. Caribbean Life Writing as World LiteratureNatalie Edwards (University of Bristol, UK)Part III: Institutionalization, Circulation, Translation 9. Premodern Japanese Life Writing: Canonization, Translation, Adaptation, and WorldingChristina Laffin, University of British Columbia, Canada10. Whose Life (Narrative) Is It Anyways? Circulation, Translation, and Unbelonging in Gina Saraceni's Adriático and Raquel Rivas Rojas’s Inventario para después de una GuerraIrina R. Troconis, Cornell University, USA11. Worlding Precarious Lives: Southeast-Asian Workers in TaiwanJoan Chiung-huei Chang, National Taiwan Normal University, TaiwanPart IV: Life Writing: Local History and Global Memory12. Surviving Genres: Life Writing and the Communist Carceral ExperienceOana Popescu-Sandu, University of Southern Indiana, USA13. A Nicaraguan Woman's Auto/biographical Resistance: Gioconda Belli and Literary [R]EvolutionLisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, The College of New Jersey, USA14. Globalizing Caste: The Contemporary Dalit Feminist MemoirSreya Chatterjee, University of Houston, USAPart V: Worldliness, Materialities, and Activism15. Travel, Disease, and Life Writing as World Literature: Jack London, Audre Lorde, Gao Xingjian, Alfred HornungJohannes Gutenberg, University of Mainz, Germany16. Children's Drawings from Ukraine: Drawing Life, Drawing the WorldKate Douglas and Edith Hill, Flinders University, Australia17. Activism and the Graphic Memoir: Between the Personal and the PoliticalJulia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania, USAAfterword. Life History and the Literatures of the World: Notes toward a ProvocationS. Shankar, University of Hawai'i, Manoa, USABibliographyIndex

At its most measured, Life Writing as World Literature explores the challenges of enacting the transnational without reifying the nation, of advocating for the relational and collaborative without erasing individual agency, and of embracing the aesthetic while insisting on the citational. At its most ambitious, it suggests that life writing might usefully ‘blow up the very notion of World Literature.’ A valuable addition to the related projects of worlding literature and articulating lives.