Mary Theis

I-Chun Wang

This volume celebrates a fascinating variety of nonfiction known as life writing. This genre resonates quintessentially with the core of the humanities in its profoundly individual ways of fusing narrators with their narrative subjects. The book brings together scholars from around the world to explore the personal mapping of such narrators in the context of their cultural legacies. The hybrid fusions themselves form several subgenres that complement each other as they affirm human dignity and values and our need for human connection, felt at all times, but especially during times of globally met threats. The ever-expanding forms of hybridography here—along with testimonies, diaries, letters and journals—bear witness to how individuals have contrived to overcome their own traumatic sources of pain and suffering to discover joy and how to further map their pathways forward. The narratives not only communicate important information and aesthetic beauty needed to prolong troubled lives due to social anxiety or mental illness, but also challenge sociocultural issues involving stigma, migration, racial discrimination and persecution, human trafficking, and ecological concerns. Global in scope, personal in focus, and historically and culturally contextualized, the analyses provided here once again illustrate how much we have to learn from each other.

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