Life Writing in the Anthropocene

Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Jessica White is based at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography. She is currently writing an ecobiography of nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

Gillian Whitlock is Emeritus Professor in Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, Australia. She is currently writing Inhumanities: Refugee Lives in the Archives, a life narrative of asylum seekers in detention at the Nauru camp, and the testimony of the things they left behind.