Both the practice and study of life writing flourish worldwide, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This major watershed in the history of Europe has generated intensive memory work through life writing, in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union and far beyond. Highlighting auto/biographical practices in western and eastern, old and new or future parts of Europe, the essays in the volume "Life Writing Matters in Europe" discuss the construction of individual, cultural and political identities within a changing landscape from the late eighteenth century until the present.

Life Writing Matters in Europe contains a selection of reworked papers presented at the international conference ‘Life Writing in Europe’ (2009) that was the starting point for the network IABA Europe (http://www.iaba-europe.eu)

BOOK LAUNCH: Thursday March 15, 2012, 16-18 hrs
VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam.
Main building, Room 10A-04, 16-18 hrs.

16.00 Welcome - Dr. Anneke Ribberink (VU University)

Introduction - Dr. Marijke Huisman (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Presentation - to Prof.dr. Susan Legene (VU University)

‘Life Writing in Europe’ - Prof.dr. Alfred Hornung (Gutenberg University Mainz)

17.00 Drinks at the 12th Floor

Contact & registration: Marijke Huisman, m.huisman@eshcc.eur.nl

Life Writing Matters in Europe
Marijke Huisman, Anneke Ribberink, Monica Soeting & Alfred Hornung eds. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag (www.winter-verlag-hd.de). ISBN: 978-3-8253-5963-8. Price: 42 Euro

Table of Contents

Marijke Huisman - Introduction: Life Writing Matters in Europe; Catherine Viollet - European French-Language Life Writing in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries;
Elena Gretchanaia - Cultural Models: Russian Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Francophone Life Writing;
Marijke Huisman - Translation Politics: Foreign Autobiographies on the Nineteenth Century Dutch Book Market;
Paweł Rodak - Past, Present, and Future of Autobiography Competitions and Archives in Poland;
Christian Moser - Museums of the Self: Autobiographic Memory and the Cultural Practice of Collecting;
Sabine Kim - Voices and Inscriptions: Making Sense(s) in Autobiography;
Nataliya Rodigina & Tatiana Saburova - Changing Identity Formations in Nineteenth-Century Russian Intellectuals’ Autobiographies;
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir - A Writer’s Life: The Modernist Group and Questions of Identity in Autobiographical Writing;
Esra Almas - Self and The City. Locus of Identity in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City;
Anna Izabela Cichoń -Construction of Identity and the Role of Autobiography in V.S. Naipaul’s Work;
Barbara Henkes - Letter-Writing and the Construction of a Transnational Family: A Private Correspondence between the Netherlands and Germany, 1920–1949;
Eva Rovers - A Dutch Collector with a German Heart: The Regional Aspect of Life Writing in the Case of Helene Kröller-Müller (1869-1939);
Lisbeth Larsson - Uses of Biography: The Swedish Version;
Mineke Bosch - Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, But If They Do... Reflections on Gender and Biography;
Anneke Ribberink - Margaret Thatcher and Gro Harlem Brundtland: Two Women Prime Ministers from the Spectre of a Comparative Biography; Martins Kaprans - Constructing Generational Identity in Post-Communist Autobiographies: the Case of Latvia;
Leena Kurvet-Käosaar - An Anthology of Lives: Jaan Kross’s Kallid Kaasteelised and Estonian Memorial Culture;
Ioana Luca - Post-Communist Life Writing and Memory Maps