Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics

Auto/Biography and Reputation Politicsbrings together for the first time these two research fields todemonstrate thatlife writing is reputation politics.The innovativecollection is postdisciplinary,comparative, and transnational, with contributions on works from originally seven languages. Authors show how studies inreputation politics andmanagementgain from theory andmethodologyin research onlife writingand how studies in life writing benefit from attention to criteria and terms developed in studies of reputation politics. The genres of thelife writingstreated 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 laternineteenth-century Germany, Greece, and Ottoman Empire, twentieth-century Britain and India, to twenty-first century United States, France, and Russia. In each contribution,principles of reputationpolitics studies are applied to the fiction and non-fiction features of life writing acrossvarious 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 lifewriting reputations interact with strategies of personal politics andpolitical programs.