ABSTRACT
Both “biography” and its Anglo-Saxon rooted equivalent “life writing” (βι ′ος = life, γραφι ′α = writing) are relatively recent terms, according to The Oxford Dictionary, which cites first uses in English from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. In current academic parlance, as well as in many handbooks and how-to guides, the term “life writing” covers genres as diverse as blogs, diaries, hagiography, genealogy, letters, memoir, testimony, travel writing, and both biography and autobiography. In the widely read primer, Reading Autobiography, the authors Smith and Watson open up the field even further by adding the term “life narrative” for “acts of self-presentation of all kinds and in diverse media that take the producer’s life as their subject, whether written, performative, visual, filmic, or digital” (2010: 4); life writing thus becomes a subset of something larger called life narrative. This entry concentrates on forms that can be printed and therefore mainly employs the term life writing (on other forms of experimental life narrative, see Elias, this volume).
