In the history of Western literature, life writing--a category which includes autobiography, biography, diary, epistles, memoir, travels, etc.-- is a widely popular narrative form on account of its representation and translation of quotidian reality and cultural phenomena. Life writing not only deals with writing in generic terms, but is concerned with life itself and so escapes the risk of isolating the self from the many Others in the community. The ethic of life writing lies in overcoming the narrowness of one’s own vision, and examining and situating the self in the communal and collective contexts of human relations. Even though memory, upon which life writing depends, begins with the individual, it is nonetheless regarded as a social construct due to the rapport between the individual and society. The memory of the individual contributes to construction of collective memories in one way or another.
Life Writing, edited and introduced by Yuan-wen Chi and Yu-cheng Lee, surveys the transformation and development of the form in the history of Western culture. The twelve essays in the book cover a variety of topics of current interest. Part I examines the interrelationship between mainstream American literature and minority/ethnic literature, including Asian American and Native American Literature, ecological writings, and memoirs by the disabled and adoptees. The arguments explore the transnational and intercultural experiences and traumas of ethnic groups in different contexts, while reflecting deeply on ecological disasters resulting from global capitalism. Part II investigates the European female autobiography and the life stories of Chinese Australian writers. Each paper from the collection interprets a specific writer and his/her works within a referential framework related to the subject matter, and deciphers the representation of codes and metaphors in the text, respectively.
With a transnational and intercultural trajectory, the twelve essays in the book analyze texts by authors from the Asian Pacific, Europe and America chronologically, ranging from the medieval to the present. The book gives voice to minority groups focued on issues of class, gender, race, ecology, and transnational adoption. It presents life writing as the invention of an alternative genre about life which subverts traditional writing styles, and in multifaceted forms, depicts various manners of life. The book also responds to the ethical turn of life writing by reconsidering and reevaluating the value of alterity in the context of globalization, and examining the complex and sophisticated relationships between self and society, memory and history, the individual and the collective.

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