Patrick Hayes. The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 7: Postwar to Contemporary, 1945-2020

Abstract

The latest volume of The Oxford History of Life-Writing provides valuable insight into the developments of life-writing from 1945 to 2020. This is a pivotal period, according to author Patrick Hayes, who points out that it is during this time when the term ‘life-writing’ itself was coined. He goes on to argue that this era’s societal upheaval and narrative experiments ‘transformed our understanding of what life-writing is’ (1). This volume chronicles the ways various life-writing modes reflected the social and philosophical turmoil that emerged in the immediate wake of two World Wars, the Holocaust, the dawn of the Atomic Age, and the myriad social movements for the rights of under-represented groups. Hayes offers a literary and cultural analysis of the rapidly evolving styles and genres of life-writing that mirror the rapidly changing societies from which they emerge. Unlike the two previous volumes from this series that have been published thus far, this latest entry does not organize each chapter around a particular writer (as did vol. 2) or a specific genre of life-writing (vol. 1). Rather, the chapters focus on a series of social themes. This organizational strategy allows each chapter to juxtapose a variety of authors and life-writing styles and genres in an effort to chart the larger cultural issues at play in different life-writing contexts; the book does not serve as an encyclopaedic resource volume, but rather provides compelling literary and cultural analyses and close readings of particular texts. In this way, Hayes’s book serves as more of a critical monograph than a comprehensive compendium.