Life writing is a relatively new study which includes conventional "autobiographical" genres of writing such as diaries, journals, letters and autobiography itself as well as fictional and nonfictional elements. This is the first book produced which includes a great variety of life writingtexts to read and study. In addition to international examples of life writing, this anthology includes detailed information about the authors to help students understand how and why they wrote as they did, major themes of each work, a summary of style and form of each selection and notes on whyvarious selections were chosen for the text. Woman writers include Emma Goldman, Lillian Hillman, Suzanna Rosenberg, Anais Nin, Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Kogawa.

Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women’s studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies. Her publications include Essays on Life Writing, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for 1992. Kadar’s research interests include the politics of life writing, especially as represented in survivor narratives; the construction of privilege and knowledge in women’s life writing; and, Hungarian and Romani autobiography and historical accounts, biographical traces and fragments.

Susanna Egan is a professor in the department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent monograph is titled Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography.

Jeanne Perreault is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary and is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography.

Linda Warley teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has published articles in journals such as Canadian Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Reading Canadian Autobiography, a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing.

Marlene Kadar's profile page