The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These “unlikely documents” include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres—a play, the long poem, or the short story.
Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing.
Read the chapter “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women’s studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies. Her publications include Essays on Life Writing, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for 1992. Kadar’s research interests include the politics of life writing, especially as represented in survivor narratives; the construction of privilege and knowledge in women’s life writing; and, Hungarian and Romani autobiography and historical accounts, biographical traces and fragments.

Susanna Egan is a professor in the department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent monograph is titled Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography.

Jeanne Perreault is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary and is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography.

Linda Warley teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has published articles in journals such as Canadian Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Reading Canadian Autobiography, a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing.

Marlene Kadar's profile page

Linda Warley specializes in Canadian life writing, including texts by First Nations and Métis authors. She has a recent chapter on John Gallant and Seth’s Bannock, Beans and Black Tea in Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014). She is co-editor, with Marlene Kadar,, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan of Tracing the Autobiographical (WLU Press, 2005) and, with Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar, of Photographs, Histories, and Meanings (2009).

Linda Warley's profile page

Jeanne Perreault is professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is coeditor (with Sylvia Vance) of Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada (1990), and coeditor (with Joseph Bruchac) of Critical Visions: Contemporary North American Native Writing, a special issue of Ariel (1994). She is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography (1995). Other publications include “Memory Alive: An Inquiry into the Uses of Memory in Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Halfe, and Joy Harjo” (Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Renée Hulan, ECW Press, 1999), and “Writing Whiteness: Linda Griffith’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica” (Essays on Canadian Writing, 1996). Currently, she is examining the racializing of whiteness in white women’s texts.

Jeanne Perreault's profile page

Susanna Egan has recently retired from the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. She has written extensively on autobiography and published two monographs: Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (1980) and Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (2000). Her insecurities about knowledge having increased over the years, she can no longer distinguish between faith and doubt.

Susanna Egan's profile page

Since 1995, the Life Writing series has established itself as a major forum for showcasing primary sources and theoretical work in the field of autobiography studies in Canada.... International in scope Tracing the Autobiographical unsettles the generic boundaries of auto/biography (the slash consisten witha programmatic effort to blur the lines) and offers a variety of innovative reading strategies and interdisciplinary approaches.... Reading these contributions is not only an intellectual feast, but also an ethical encounter with lives lived by people who have left only fragments or traces of themselves.... Resonating with the themes of 'ethics, tyranny, and hope' several of the essays present a testimony of pain and erasure that leaves the reader profoundly moved.

Eva C. Karpinski, University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2005, Volume 76, number 1, Winter 2007, 2008 January

This is a fascinating collection, full of innovative reading practices and 'egodocuments.'... All of these critics are attuned to the more performative notions of selfhood, the contingent, and historical projections of the self in texts.... Autobiography writing and critism is now sharp and exciting, and as it happens much of the best is also Canadian.... Tracing the Autobiographical ...

Gillian Whitlock, Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008, 2008 August