Mapping the self

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