ABSTRACT
Life writing criticism has been occupied with two major problems for the past decades. The first of these revolves around the question of how to distinguish life writing from fiction. The second might be termed a relational turn: tergiversating from viewing human subjects as autonomous entities, life writing analyses now increasingly regard selfhood as constituted by and responsive to significant others. A general outline of the state of the art suggests that critics currently worry much less about the former and more about the latter. But if formalist and structuralist preoccupations with genre divides have become unfashionable in criticism, this does not necessarily mean that writers of personal narratives have come to terms with blurry boundaries between history, memory and the imagination, nor the partial recognition, misremembrances and paradoxes experienced when trying to fabricate a text based on their own lives. This challenge is arguably exacerbated in the case of lives fractured and multiplied by long-term effects of Empire, such as migration, diaspora and transcultural unbelonging.
