Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics brings together for the first time these two research fields to demonstrate that life writing is reputation politics. The innovative collection is postdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational, with contributions on works from originally seven languages. The authors show how studies in reputation politics and reputation management gain from theory and methodology in research on life writing and how studies in life writing benefit from attention to criteria and terms developed in studies of reputation politics. The genres of the life writing treated include autobiography, autofiction, autosociobiography, autobiographical novel, biofiction, biography, diary, historiography, littérature engagée, political memoir, satire, scholarly article, and presidential campaign speech, and range across historical periods from the Byzantine Empire in late antiquity, early nineteenth-century Netherlands and later nineteenth-century Germany, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, twentieth-century Britain and India, to the United States, France, and Russia in the twenty-first century. In each contribution, principles of reputation politics studies are applied to the fiction and non-fiction features of life writing across various genres and their conventions. Chapters attend to narrative strategies, public relations, gendering, racialization, and class politics. The contributions discuss how reputations are created, changed, destroyed, or saved in auto/biographies and how life writing reputations interact with strategies of personal politics and political programs.