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As much as we may like to evade them, illness and disability inescapably attend human embodiment - we are all vulnerable subjects. So it might seem natural and inevitable that the most universal, most democratic, form of literature - autobiography - should address these common features of human experience. Yet for the most part, autobiographical writing expressive of illness and disability remained quite uncommon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements. Women's liberation, with its signature manifesto Our...

The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers, and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities.

Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider...

"Thomas Couser's Signifying Bodies comes at a crucial moment when debates about physician assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and neo-natal screening are raising the question of what constitutes a 'life worth living' for persons with disabilities. Couser's work engages these debates by exploring the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities. As Couser brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, these works challenge the 'preferred rhetorics' by which such narratives are usually written (triumphalist, gothic, nostalgic) while making...