Cirrus@Austlit

'In Essayism, his 2017 critical lyrical essay (inevitably) on the essay as genre, Brian Dillon opens with a kind of textual performance: a teeming list of examples, oblique references to unnamed essayists, a litany of topics and a profusion of content, discursive, paratactic and contradictory. This performs, Dillon observes, something of the effect that the term ‘essay’ denotes: ‘Imagine a type of writing so hard to define that its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial’ (2017, 12). Essays can be partial and contingent, doubtful or incomplete and these qualities are values. ‘What holds these tendencies together? Classically, we say it is the writing “I” ' (Dillon 2017, 18).' (Kylie Cardell : Essays in Life Writing, Introduction)

'This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. Life Narrative is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field defined through attention to diverse styles of personal and auto/biographical narration and to subjectivity and ethics in acts of self-representation. The essay is a uniquely sympathetic mode for such scholarship, responsive to diverse methods, genres, and concepts and enabling a flexible, hybrid critical and creative approach. Many of the essays curated for this volume are by the authors of creative works of life writing who are seeking to reflect critically on disciplinary issues connected to practice, ethics, audience, or genre. Others show academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds engaged in creative critical self-reflection, using methods of cultural analysis, ethnography, or embodied scholarship to address foundational and emerging issues and concepts in relation to identity, experience, or subjectivity.

'Essays in Life Writing positions the essay as a unique nexus of creative and critical practice, available to academics publishing peer-reviewed scholarly work from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and a form of scholarship that is contributing in exciting and vigorous ways to the development of new knowledge in Life Narrative as a field.

'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.' (Publication summary)