This volume gathers together the papers from a conference

held at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon, France, in the summer

of 2002. Under the title "Mapping the Self : Space, Identity,

Discourse in British Auto/Biography" they explore an immense

range of cultural practices. Life-writing, we may conclude from

this evidence, reflects the endlessly contingent forms of our historical

identity. We can expect pious chronicles of sin and salvation,

heroic travellers, tales, salacious metropolitan memoirs, the

sombre confessions of addled genius, the discretely triumphant

literary memoir. Individualistic secular cultures are so recklessly

pluralist, so extravagantly sympathetic to the deviant, so fascinated

by simple human peculiarity that we soon begin to wonder,

from the evidence of this volume, if life-writing in its distinctively

British form has been just this : the playful collective

reverie of a nation otherwise dedicated to the sober lucid everyday

business of empire. Life-writing is a delicate instrument for

measuring out the boundaries between the real and the imagined

lives that a culture may contain. It might tell us, at any given historical

moment, just how complicated we are allowed to be.

Geoffrey Wall