Abstract:

Since the beginning of the first settlements in America, life narratives have been created in various forms and have become part of American letters although the academic study of such narratives was scarce until the second half of the twentieth century. American life narratives have benefitted from this long tradition starting with the diaries and journals kept by Pilgrims and Puritans, and captivity narratives, such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791). After the 1960s there was an explosion in the production and reception of life narratives, and clusters of multitude genres appeared, partially due to the conceptions of broadening civil liberties and other related public concerns. African American, Native American, Asian American, Latino and Chicano life writing, and LGBTQIA+ memoirs were the result of marginalized groups claiming agency in defining their life experiences and identities outside dominant discourses. Meanwhile other concerns and platforms of expression gave rise to disability narratives, celebrity narratives, food memoirs, ecological narratives, survivor narratives, graphic memoirs, and online lives, to name a few.

Keywords: