AustLit

'As my co-editor Maria Takolander writes elsewhere in this collection, ‘Life writing has long been theorised in terms of its limits’. Indeed, one might say that a concern with limits brought the field of life-writing studies into being. The rise of auto/biography studies (the forerunner of life-writing studies) in the 1970s and 80s was in large part a concern with the generic and disciplinary limits of what constituted both auto/biography and ‘Literature’. This was despite Paul de Man’s warning that attempts to define autobiography in terms of genre ‘seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (919). Philippe Lejeune sought to circumvent such definitional problems by attending to autobiography as a mode of reading, and (famously) understood the relationship between autobiographer and reader as a ‘pact’ (a formal agreement of limitations). Lejeune’s legal metaphor and structuralist approach, though, was far from reductive. His conclusion that autobiography is a ‘historically variable contractual effect’ (30) effectively draws attention to the limits of proposing limits.'  (Editorial introduction)