a/b Auto/biography Studies

One of my goals for the coming weeks will be to figure out what journals I'm most publishable in and to get a feel for the kind of project I might do for each one.

What I like about a/b is that it's not a China journal, so for any writing I put out there I'll be taking the role of "China hand" explaining my exotic slanty-eyed friends to the English and French specialists. That's not the only role I ever want to have, but it's a good one to get some practice at, methinks.

23, volumes, 2 issues to each volume.

Volume 22. Jay Prosser reviews the 6th IABA conference in Honolulu (he notes he missed panels because he was at the beach). Miram Fuchs reviews volume 1 of the new Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies; I need to check her new book Teaching Life Writing Texts.

Volume 1. There is information here on how the journal got started back in 1985 as an idea among a/b-minded MLA folks. There are plugs for the journals Women's Diaries, Prose Studies, and Biography. The first review is of A.O.J. Cockshut's whimsical volume The Art of Autobiography in 19th and 20th Century England (Yale University Press, 1984; I've encountered this before).

"Backlist" ("standard works in the field")

Weintraub, Karl. The value of the individual : self and circumstance in autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.