AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The new, recently re-designed Taylor and Francis website has added much to user-friendliness for journal readers and submitting authors. But this edition of Life Writing has made me realise that in leaving the old format behind we have lost a useful feature—the ability to quickly scan the list of contributors and get a sense of the overall ‘balance’ of where our articles are coming from. In a globalised world this may seem irrelevant, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having an interest in the geographical, linguistic and cultural context in which our authors write.' (Editorial introduction)
Contents
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Translators, Tricksters and Traps : The Correspondence between Paul Solanges and Henry Handel Richardson as Life-Writing Project,
single work
criticism
(p. 83-96)
'In 1910, Paul Solanges wrote to Henry Handel Richardson, author of Maurice Guest (1908), offering to translate the novel into French. Solanges had been deeply moved by the music novel recounting the story of a piano student’s attraction to a femme fatale. Throughout the translation process, which went on for over three years and was never completed due to the translator’s death, Richardson and Solanges exchanged some 300 letters. Initially Solanges was unaware that he was corresponding with a woman and although he soon began to suspect that this was the case, he never confronted her with his suspicion. Instead, the correspondents were in implicit agreement that they were setting traps for each other, a feature that has been given some scholarly attention in the study of Richardson’s creation of her male persona. However, in the present article, the ‘story of traps’ is approached primarily from the point of view of Solanges’s life-writing project. It is claimed that due to its liminal character, the correspondence sits neatly within the trickster genre. The argument is built on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as a phenomenon to be understood from a point in the future. As such, the existence today of the meticulously edited correspondence testifies to the triumphant outcome of Solanges’s painful suffering from archive fever in the writing of his life.' (Publication abstract)
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I Am Keith Wright’s Daughter : Writing Things I ‘Almost’ Cannot Say,
single work
criticism
(p. 99-111)
'I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing Things I ‘Almost’ Cannot Say is a personal and provocative perspective. Using creative writing and storying I piece/peace together my relationship to/with my father. Always a strong and unsettling presence in my life, his unexpected death forces me toward reconciliation of tensions, identities, wounds and memories. Writing/Wrighting/Righting my stories into being, my particular points of view at points in time, and examining this conflicted yet foundational relationship, helps me remember what I have learned and helps me reclaim what matters to me. Writing the things I ‘almost’ cannot say—and have not been able to say for most of my life—is a storying in and through the dark, a storying in and through the wounding, and a storying in and to healing.' (Publication abstract)
