In the forefront of the large and growing interest in life-writings. A comprehensive account of the criticism and theory of autobiography. The book makes complex debates accessible to a wide readership.

Introduction
1. Identity into form: nineteenth-century auto/biographical discourses
2. Auto/biography: between literature and science
3. Bringing the corpse to life; Woolf, Strachey and the discourse of the 'new biography'
4. Autobiography and historical consciousness
5. Saving the subject
6. The law of genre
7. Auto/biographical spaces
Bibliography
Index

Laura Marcus is Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London