Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literature -- Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others -- in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, and confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity.

In contrast to those critics of postmodernism who fear the dissolution of the active...