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About

Focus and Scope

Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (LA) presents critical and scholarly essays on lifewriting in all its forms - biography, autobiography, memoir, journals, diaries, letters, and works in media other than print. It publishes articles that describe and assess scholarly resources for biographical writing, especially collections of manuscripts and letters, and includes reviews of recently published biographies, autobiographies, and other works of lifewriting. The annual is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of lifewriting - theoretical, critical, and scholarly. Its broad scope aims to foster lively discussion of the ways that various forms of lifewriting inform and interact with each other.

A new feature is our "Findings" section. This replaces the former "Crossings" section, in which authors used more than one genre in an article, such as personal and epistolary forms. It is our observation that mixed-genre writing is now more universal and that scholars feel freer to position themselves within discussions of their scholarship.

"Findings" is our new forum for the presentation and brief discussion of noteworthy sources of lifewriting. Given the technical capacities of our new form of publication, we welcome visual as well as textual data, that is, descriptions and illustrations of lifewriting material meriting recognition and scholarly investigation by someone other than the discoverer. This forum is an opportunity to share accidental discoveries made while researching another topic, for instance. We invite libraries and archives to share information about their resources as well. This signals a return to the "source studies" of our predecessor publication.

Book Reviews are coordinated by Robert P. Ward of Brown University. We are happy to consider reviews of all recent and reissued publications of lifewriting, in both written and graphic formats.

Journal History

LA arose from the ashes of Biography and Source Studies, a scholarly journal published from 1994 to 2004 by AMS Press, Inc., New York. In 2005 Thomas R. Smith became its editor, changed its direction somewhat and its name to Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies. The first volume under this name was published in 2006. Volume 2 appeared in 2008 and Volume 3 in 2012. Carol DeBoer-Langworthy took over in 2013 and brought out Volume 4 in December 2015. Altogether, LA appeared in print volume form from 2006-2017.

Publication Frquency

This journal is published continuously all year round in one issue and volume.

Publication Fees

This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Unlike many open-access publishers, the OLH does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you ask your librarian to sign up. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.