‘Frances Sheridan, Novels, and Memoirs’ opens by noting the generic and intertextual porousness of eighteenth-century writing, with the novel continually bleeding into forms that would subsequently come to be seen as distinct, such as travel writing, biography, and the memoir. Conversely, memoirs written in the period presented as non-fiction frequently show affinities to conventions of the novel. Frances Sheridan’s work provides a particularly rich site for exploring this cross-fertilisation, in that Sheridan was both the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and in turn the subject of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824), written by her granddaughter, Alicia Le Fanu. When these two texts are put in conjunction with one another, it becomes apparent that we should understand the eighteenth-century novel and the memoir as being in dialogue with one another, not as distinct or opposed forms of writing.

Disabled Storytellers considers how medieval forms of life writing speak to Critical Disability Studies and disability-oriented communities today. The introduction opens with the author’s reflections on teaching the Middle English Revelations of Divine Love (or Showings) of Julian of Norwich during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Julian’s account of her spiritual reflections on illness and isolation in the wake of the bubonic plague deeply resonated with students, fostering unexpected connections across time and circumstances. The author then offers a comparative reading of Julian and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, highlighting Wang’s modern pilgrimage for healing and her creation of community among disabled peers. The introduction considers two of this book’s key terms: crip time, the non-normative ways disabled and ill people experience time and space; and crip intimacy, a disability-centered closeness that can connect people – including authors and readers – across time, space, and identity. Summaries of the book’s chapters are included.

This chapter surveys travel writing across medieval Afro-Eurasia, revealing how disabled and chronically ill authors adapt to ever-shifting circumstances of travel. This discussion traces how first-person reflections on mobility are shaped by divergent religiomedical frameworks (approaches to disability attending to historical religious and medical understandings of the body in any given cultural environment). From firsthand accounts to imagined journeys, travel enables writers to question social norms and envision alternate ways of living. Disability in motion not only disrupts daily routines and expectations but it also reshapes literary traditions, creating new forms of storytelling and new ways of thinking about illness, aging, and interdependence. Operating in a comparative and not a strictly chronological mode, this chapter discusses works by Muslim pilgrim-explorer Ibn Battuta and Chinese literati poets such as Bai Juyi and Shangguan Wan’er. It reintegrates European writers Margery Kempe and Teresa de Cartagena into this broader social context of transcontinental mobility.

This chapter considers the Latin poetry of medieval English poet John Gower, who became blind in later life. Gower recursively revises own poetry as his blindness increases, and he establishes a potent discourse of blind life writing that self-identified Blind advocates would later adopt in their international mission to advocate for disabled people. In addressing Gower’s life as portrayed in modern-day media (i.e., mystery novels and audiobooks, including medievalist Bruce Holsinger’s historical fiction series A Burnable Book), this chapter considers modern paradigms of “close listening” alongside works by blind theorist and memoirist Georgina Kleege. Nineteenth-century compilations of Blind authors discussed in this chapter include James Wilson’s Biography of the Blind (1838) and William Hanks Levy’s Blindness and the Blind (1872). Gower’s poetry offers a compelling early model of disability-centered poetics, reorienting English literary tradition and reception history through blindness as well as foregrounding the intimacy of authors and readers.

This chapter examines first-person writings by the deaf Spanish medieval nun Teresa de Cartagena. Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm) narrates Teresa’s movement from worldly chatter into a space of silence, alluding to her becoming deaf after entering a monastery. Reframing silence as a disciplined practice and divine gift, Teresa expands the expressive power of monastic sign lexicons (codified lists of gestures in lieu of speech), noting her dual exclusion from university environments due to her deafness and gender. Teresa’s second major work, Admiraçión operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), experiments with cross-disability metaphor through the spiritual trope of a blind man. Through her transformative rhetoric, Teresa envisions a collective of “infirm” people that anticipates coalitional thinking in disability activism today. This discussion incorporates perspectives from Deaf Studies, intersectional feminism, and contemporary Deaf activist groups who use modern media to reclaim Teresa as a “foremother” for their community.

The coda returns to crip time, a theme across many of the previous chapters. Chronically ill and disabled people can experience time in nonlinear, recursive ways, and this book shows how attentiveness to time, care, and intimacy can inform disability history as well as more global approaches to disability. This discussion sets the medieval carols and poems by deaf and blind English monk John Audelay alongside Seeta Chaganti’s scholarship on medieval lyric and dance theory. It draws parallels between Audelay’s works and modern writings by American DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, who urges audiences to decenter sight and sound to appreciate the artistic dimensions of touch and motion. The coda ends by affirming the importance of dance and crip community in works by intersectional Black feminist Sami Schalk and by Alice Sheppard, a disabled dancer, choreographer, and medieval literary historian. It ends by asking how medieval literature can help modern readers envision a more just and interconnected world.

This chapter explores writings by Thomas Hoccleve, a medieval London scribe whose recovery from a “wilde infirmite” (wild infirmity), followed by intense social isolation, profoundly shapes his poignant first-person lyric poetry. Hoccleve’s Compleinte and Series narrate the combined impacts of visual impairment, mental health crises, and social stigma, and his works anticipate some modern insights from Critical Disability Studies in theorizing the harms of professional norms and social expectations of labor and productivity. The chapter interweaves three strands: Hoccleve’s preoccupation with his facial appearance and the medieval social meanings of eyeglasses; the interplay between physical labor and his mental state; and the relevance of his poetry for readers and theorists associated with Mad Studies (an academic field that centers those who live with depression, neurodivergence, or mental illness). Hoccleve’s deeply personal meditations offer valuable insights into disability, labor, and community, revealing how medieval perspectives can enrich current conversations about unwellness and belonging.

This chapter examines dynamic networks of mutual support and caregiving in The Book of Margery Kempe, the spiritual narrative of an English housewife turned mystic, pilgrim, and traveler. Composed through oral dictation, the Book recounts Kempe’s experiences of chronic illness, aging, and care, including a remarkable meeting with Julian of Norwich to discuss their shared visionary experiences. Kempe’s encounters with disability – especially among “lepers” (likely women with Hansen’s disease) near her own hometown – reveal a radical identification with marginalized people, portraying them not as passive recipients of care but as agents of social change. The Book challenges dominant religious and medical models, suggesting how chronic illness creates intimacy and fosters community. Revisiting Teresa de Cartagena as Kempe’s near contemporary, this chapter interweaves intersectional feminist scholarship with crip theory to show how both authors use their lived experience to resist patriarchal authority and create care-based networks anticipating modern principles of Disability Justice.

It is little wonder that Los Angeles, a city of compulsive self-narration, has birthed a tradition of autobiographical literature with local particularities. A uniquely LA tradition of memoir, autobiography, and autofiction come to the fore in this chapter. Allmendinger identifies three key strands of LA life writing: the Hollywood tell-all (Barbara Payton, Christina Crawford), the gang memoir, (Rafael Pérez-Torres, Freddy Negrete) and a third, more diffuse grouping – writings by women in which frank and personal explorations of gender and sexuality predominate (Eve Babitz, Maggie Nelson, Wendy C. Ortiz). While these three forms of reflection on lives lived in Los Angeles appear disparate, Allmendinger identifies in them a shared refusal of (White, male, straight) “master” narratives of Southern Californian consciousness.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

American gay military life writing emerged as a discrete literary genre in the last decades of the twentieth century. These memoirs include tales by older men who served in World War II and accounts by younger soldiers who navigated the challenges of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In this chapter, I compare these two cohorts of writers to examine their experiences of institutional life and male bonding in the American forces. Their stories, and their purpose for writing, reveal how the forces shaped sexual and political subjectivities. Gay men from the 1940s used their narratives to document the service of “fairies” and butch men attracted to one another, straight soldiers and commanders who accepted gay personnel despite official policies, and the infinite opportunities for sex and friendship. Servicemen of recent decades tell a different story of protest. Their gay life was lonelier than their ancestors, and their memoirs function as conversion narratives. In “coming out,” they craft a respectable masculine self to demand the right to serve openly. Soldiers in both eras recall experiences of prejudice and resistance in an organization hostile and conducive to sex and love between men.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.

This chapter focuses on both the publication and reception histories of the private writings of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and E. M. Forster, among others, and explores the appeal of such works for scholars and Bloomsbury enthusiasts. Scholars have regularly mined these private writings for biographical information and for insights into their authors’ creative processes, while readers also experience the vicarious sense of being inside Bloomsbury lives, loves, and homes. This chapter provides a decade-by-decade survey of Bloomsbury life writing, highlighting the major publications and situating them within the larger context of the revival of interest in the Bloomsbury group from the 1950s onward.

For the final thirty years of their shared life, Michael Field kept an annual, co-authored diary that they entitled Works and Days. While this remarkable text provides a documentary perspective on the personalities and places of the literary and artistic fin de siècle, it also represents a significant literary achievement in its own right. The diary offers its readers an inside look at Michael Field’s interpersonal and coauthorial relationship across its many seasons, while also offering its authors a giant canvas, reminiscent of the span of a Victorian novel, for the exploration of complex questions about authorship, gender, sexuality, and desire.

This chapter imagines potential and as yet unexplored rapprochements between William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Julia de Burgos (1914–53), two contemporaneous writers on the brink of Latinx identification, as it is currently conceived. Observing their generically and linguistically diverse writing practices – marked by distinct introspections about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, pan-Hispanic, Anglo-American, and European identities – I open a discussion of the authors’ experiences of everyday spaces (the city street, the hospital ward, the intergenerational home). What I call “lyrical mobilities” constitutes the process of imagining Williams’s and de Burgos’s movements through hemispheric histories as well as geographic and linguistic spaces. It is also a critical attempt to read these two canonical authors in terms of the spaces they had in common, which, in turn, helps extend our understanding of Latinx lives across disciplines that have contained Williams and de Burgos within discrete silos.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, the English-language essay engages with colonialism and postcolonial reality to embody forms of life writing that grapple with the provocative confluences of English education, local context, and migrant desire. While conflicts between colonial legacy, postcolonial liberation, and creative imagination assume urgency with pioneers such as V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, linguistic limits on ethical and political values emerge as defining concerns for apartheid-riven writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, while the scope and constraints of postcolonial representation energise the essays of Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri. The fluid and constantly changeable identity of the postcolonial subject that drives the aspirations of the postcolonial essay finds language in its promiscuous texture and heterogeneous structure, its dalliance with analysis, narrative, and image, and its perpetually wandering and unfinished form.

This chapter traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.