Auto/Biography in Canada

``These two volumes [Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions and Tracing the Autobiographical] from Wilfrid Laurier University Press introduce an exciting and substantial body of new work in autobiography studies.... In Canada now, the leading scholarly researchers in this field are at work collaboratively, and they are both surveying and shaping a field that is increasingly diverse, cross-disciplinary, and in multimedia forms.... Rak's ... intention ... is to exceed the boundaries of literary criticism.'' -- Gillian Whitlock -- Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008, 200808
``Julie Rak evidently set herself the task of connecting with scholars in the social sciences who are using narrative research methods, and the result is the publication here of essays that have resounding implications for how we, in several intersecting fields, think about what constitutes a good life and what counts as competent communication to others about our lives....One can look [to Rak's introduction] for a systematic mapping of auto/biography studies as a scholarly field (historical and current) and for an explicit engagement with the overlap between autobiography studies and cultural studies as political projects. A model of clarity and comprehensiveness, this introduction will be a valuable starting point for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and an important sounding-board for the next wave of scholarship on auto/biography in Canada.'' -- Sarah Brophy -- Chimo, Fall 2006, 200610
``Charting the Canadian development of life writing studies, thes essays in Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions offer crucial new theoretical and critical perspectives. Julie Rak's introduction is a model of its genre, perceptively surveying the field to resituate existing criticism and persuasively theorize new directions. The contributors' methodological approaches serve as a highly productive paradigm for how to read certain auto/biographies. Engaging, lucid, and critically sophisticated, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of auto/biography.'' -- Smaro Kamboureli, University of Toronto, author of Scandalous Bodies: DiasporicLiterature in English Canada and editor of Roy Kiyooka's Pacific Rim Letters -- 200808
``[E]ngaging and sophisticated, providing fascinating methodological and theoretical prospects and directions for auto/biography studies.'' -- Eva C. Karpinski -- University of Toronto Quarterly, Letters in Canada 2005, Volume 76, number 1, Winter 2007, 200801