The complex history of the journals of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich (1901-1977), the German proto-feminist, author, magazine editor/publisher/journalist and WWII resistance fighter, has in recent years generated a rich body of scholarship in both German and English language criticism. A conspicuous gap in this scholarship concerns the English translation of the journals, quickly “tricked” into English by June Barrows Mussey (1910-1985) in ways that have remained pretty much unexamined. And yet, Friedrich’s most famous publication, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1938-45 was actually born in translation, appearing in Mussey’s versioning for Henry Holt Co. some months before the journal debuted in its original German. This essay delves into the void, reconstructing what we can (and cannot) know about the transmission and translation of Friedrich’s Berlin Underground. Further, the essay analyzes key features of the Henry Holt edition’s presentation and marketing for an Anglo-American audience to propose that the English editions of Friedrich’s journal provide a fascinating example of translation in the broader sense of the transformation of cultural forms, completing a “domesticating” process only begun by J.B. Mussey’s interlingual translation.

Amy Prendergast’s archival study of women’s diaries from eighteenth-century Ireland demonstrates that recovery work in women’s literature is far from complete. A significant contribution to diary studies, particularly in the context of Irish women’s literature and eighteenth-century studies, Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810 showcases an impressive amount of archival discovery and manuscript engagement. The book’s opening list of eighteenth-century Irish diarists —more than forty in number— along with details of their diary manuscripts’ locations (some even missing or destroyed) speaks for itself. These are the kind of Irish texts that, up until now, have been very little (if at all) discussed in academic research. This book, however, is not simply a series of biographies or reading summaries. While offering her reader a distinct snapshot of each of the female diarists she discusses, capturing their writing styles and personal concerns, Prendergast also provides astute academic commentary about the nature of the diary form and Irish women’s writing more broadly. This book is primarily interested in form and feminism, but it does not shy away from Ireland’s colonial context either. In some of the most interesting parts of the book, Prendergast examines the privileged, Anglican diarists’ take on —or omission of— the Irish Catholic tenantry. Like the diaries it studies, Mere Bagatelles is multi-faceted, displaying a number of academic methodologies and a range of eighteenth-century concerns, from melancholia and grief to landscape and nationalism. Although niche in its subject matter and perhaps limited in its focus on a primarily Protestant female elite, Prendergast nevertheless expands and enlivens our picture of eighteenth-century Ireland by adding new colorful details to a familiar portrait of that century.

In her memoir Kathleen Watt narrates her decade-long confrontation with facial cancer (osteosarcoma) of the upper jaw and the extensive reconstructive surgeries that ensued. Watt frames her illness within the broader politics of appearance and identity. Central to her narrative is the face as a site of selfhood, recognition, and ethical encounter, reflecting Levinas’s philosophy. She resists reductive illness tropes by emphasizing existential transformation, visibility, and relational vulnerability. Her memoir provides scholars with valuable insights into embodiment, narrative identity, and the interpretive work of illness narratives.

This paper is the first examination of its kind of the Russian-language autofiction tradition, which emerged and developed in the context of recent socio-political upheavals. There is currently no single and universal understanding of what ‘autofiction’ is, and each national literary tradition implies its own nuances. In Russian literature, autofiction also has its own specific agenda and modulations, which derive exclusively from practice rather than theory (as was the case, say, with French literature). Initially facing harsh scepticism, Russian autofiction has gradually become a significant literary genre, largely preoccupied with the personal and collective traumas of the post-Soviet era. The paper traces the genre’s peculiarities and evolution, highlighting its roots in Soviet ‘camp prose’ and émigré memoirs. The first part of the paper provides a comprehensive overview of how autofiction has emerged and gained prominence in recent Russian literature. It explores the genre’s thematic preoccupations and its interaction with broader literary traditions, including its adaptation and transformation of Western autofictional texts. The second part employs theories of cultural traumas and cultural memory to analyse how Russian-language autofiction represents and refracts the traumatic experiences of its authors, offering new perspectives on collective memory and identity. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates how Russian autofiction affects the ‘transpersonal dimension’ through exploration of distorted family memories as well as dealing with the intergenerational and intertextual transmission of traumatic experience.

This essay is a reflection on the process of creating a Cloak for Courage in the Anthropocene, from early ideas to the finished garment. We describe our collaborative practice and methodology as the composite eco-poet, kin’d & kin’d, challenged by the work of Donna Haraway to reassess our relationship with the many-more-than-human. We show how US poet Jorie Graham influenced our movement from a focus on hope to a commitment to courage at this time of eco-crisis, and how our concern with reciprocity, beauty and uncertainty as working principles led to the particular form that the Cloak took. Drawing on the lyric essay that we originally wrote about the process, ‘The evolution of a thought about courage in the Anthropocene’, we also illuminate the set of writing practices that would ‘consecrate’ 47 wild objects to make them into amulets for courage for the Cloak’s pockets. We discuss how being-with, thinking-with and listening to, the wild objects became crucial methods of inquiry and developing respect. We conclude that the whole experience of conceiving of and making the Cloak was an experiment with uncertainty, and that ultimately, we can only point towards what we might call courage in this era.

In Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (2023), Jarmila Mildorf examines oral storytelling as a complex rhetorical enterprise. Her overarching frame of reference is ‘fictional contamination’, a term she coins to describe what she views as an in-built fictionalization tendency of narrative, its ‘potential for fictionalization’ (6). Mildorf displays broad, cross-disciplinary theoretical knowledge, and deftly connects a detailed analysis informed by narrative theory, linguistics, and social research with reflections on larger topics like identity construction, cultural story templates, the manipulative use of narrative, and the dynamics of family storytelling. The central concept of fictional contamination, though, suffers from overreach, which raises ethical as well as theoretical issues. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the book’s many merits, not least for scholars of life writing.

Monica Soeting co-founded the European Journal of Life Writing, and the European section of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA). As a life writing scholar, her research explores the construction of individual, cultural and political identities through life writing. She was journal manager of the European Journal of Life Writing from 2011 to 2019, and before that she worked as an editor on the Dutch Biografie Bulletin, a journal of biography studies. Monica has also written the biography of Dutch author Cissy van Marxveldt and is currently working on a biography of queen Emma, who was queen regent of the Netherlands from 1890 to 1898. She co-edited, together with Marijke Huisman, Anneke Ribberink, and Alfred Hornung, the seminal edited volume Life Writing Matters in Europe.

Throughout a career spanning four decades, Colin Davis has established himself as a main proponent of a philosophical and hermeneutic approach to the study of the narrative arts in which the prime goal is to come to a fuller understanding, not only of the work at hand, but also of broader contexts. In this approach, a novel or a film can be both an object of study, as well as a means with which to study the world. In the work of Davis himself, this has led to careful close readings that are informed by, but also further develop ethics, philosophy, and hermeneutics, often with a focus on trauma. Many of his studies concern different forms of life writing, especially from Holocaust Literature.

The author focuses on the Second World War, but draws attention to the deep genealogy of the phrase “wartime diaries,” treating them as a special form of recording borderline situations in which a person is confronted with violence and death, which go beyond the ways of coping with these experiences, and the community is faced with the horror of mass extermination. Culture and civilization are in a state of catastrophe, destruction and collapse. Examples of records of such experiences in the past include plague logs and pogrom chronicles. The concept of “wartime diaries” has two basic features: 1. they are written in borderline situations and contain a record of limit experiences; 2. the primary distin­guishing criterion is the proximity of the record and the experience. The author presents the topography of diaristic records and the circles of experience they testify to. As for the topography of writing, the observation field was narrowed only to the area of the Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos. From the various experiences within the thematic spectrum of the diaries, the author presents the hunger in the ghettos. The article proposes to expand the genological area of the diaries and draw attention to diaristic borderlands and genological hybrids. This broadened spectrum of forms would fit between the diary and the chronicle, and between the letters and the diary. There are also “texts in extremis”, which can be considered a unique “ultimate diaristic record”. This separate group consists of various types of inscriptions on the walls of torture rooms and prisons, places where convicts are held. The act of writing and the moment of experience merge.

This article presents peasant economic ideologies and conceptions examined in the light of interwar Polish diary competitions. Using the tools of Karen Barber’s anthropology of text, I argue that these accounts, partly in defiance of the policy of the time of portraying peasant helplessness and misery, told the story of peasant traditional economic notions tied simultaneously to modern economic ideologies: agrarianism and the cooperative-promoting popular movement. This intertwining of modern and traditional thinking promoted economic concepts and practices forgotten and overlooked by modernization processes, supported by peasants, but also by a socially engaged intelligentsia of bourgeois or landed gentry origin. Peasant economics and economic concepts often avoided extremes: on the one hand, the economic collectivism promised by communist ideologies, and on the other, the liberal individualism associated with the ideology of capitalist laissez-faire. By practicing economic abruptness, they promoted a set of economic virtues forgotten in time of Polish modernization. The description of the process requires a new vocabulary and new historical-anthropological tools.