Sean Grass, ed., Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market

Abstract

The critical niche Sean Grass began to explore with his seven contributors before the pandemic has yielded a collection of essays that is at once wide-ranging and thorough. Indeed, Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market not only achieves its stated aim of recovering the “sense of life writing’s dense imbrication in the workings of the market” through its focus on the minor figures, but also explores an impressive range of genres and themes, so that it will even reward those readers whose interests lie outside the field of life writing. Today, life writing is an umbrella term that includes not only autobiography and biography but a great diversity of once “unconsidered” forms. Thanks to this all-embracing characteristic of the genre in question, readers can find in this volume discussions on autobiography, biography, journal and newspaper articles, as well as works of fiction and even uninscribed diaries, whose authors and subjects include not only famous white men, but also obscure women and people of colour.