ABSTRACT
The excitement of autobiography as a category of study is that it links together many different disciplines – literature, history, sociology, cultural studies. At the same time, within each of these fields, the study of autobiography explodes disciplinary boundaries and requires an understanding of other approaches, methods and practices. Autobiography makes trouble: it is difficult to define as a distinct genre,1 on the borderline between fact and fiction, the personal and the social, the popular and the academic, the everyday and the literary (Marcus 1994). This kind of disruptive interdisciplinarity, the challenging of traditional boundaries and definitions, has also been central to the feminist project, especially as articulated in Women’s Studies, and autobiography provides a meeting-place for many different kinds of feminist approach. Feminist approaches in turn have helped to revolutionise the study of autobiography, expanding its definition to include not just a literary genre or a body of texts but a practice that pervades many areas of our lives (Gilmore 1994; Gagnier 1991; Stanley and Broughton in this collection). A different way to put this would be that autobiographical practices are now seen to operate in many different written, spoken and visual genres, such as application forms, interviews and family photographs.
