This collection of 15 essays with a critical introduction explores how women's life-writing reflects and shapes a community's values - whether that community is global, national, or local. The authors examine women's autobiographical texts from a variety of perspectives, including feminism, cultural studies, postmodernism, and New Historicism. The material analyzed includes novels, memoirs, autobiographies, web pages, online zines, letters, religious records, anthologies, and deportation narratives.
This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Prose Studies.

Women 's life writings provide an incomparable window into the various cultural and historical communities in which we live. This book presents a unique view of this great legacy by critically examining how these writings both reflect and shape our communities. It draws on a wealth of material such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, religious records and many other sources, from many of the finest female writers in history. These writings enable insight into fields ranging from cultural studies and feminism, to postmodernism and new historicism.

This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Prose Studies.

Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web explores the impact of major theorist, Donna Haraway, in such diverse areas as feminisms, Marxism, new materialism, science studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, digital media, and life narrative. The book shows how Haraway's decades-long career as a major theoretical voice and provocateur of thinking about new and complex connections across technology, species, and disciplines has generated bold experiments in writing from the perspective and senses of non-human species, in photographic self-portraiture of bodily life, in animating the lives of scientists, in radical genealogy, in playful teaching methods and much more. Focusing on the ways in which Haraway's oeuvre have affected and will continue to challenge life narrative theory and practice, the chapters in this book present cross-disciplinary perspectives which are both personal and critical. As scholars, students and activists inspired by Haraway's work, these essays together ask all of us to think about where we place ourselves in an age of environmental crisis and how to live in a 'natureculture web' which is as fragile as it is beautiful. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.