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Preface: The Concept of this Handbook

This handbook on ‘Autobiography/Autofiction’ is a challenge – and a risk. When Manuela Gerlof from de Gruyter proposed to edit a handbook on autobiography, I hesitated at first. As I had already conducted quite a bit of research in the field of autobiography in the German speaking world and on the theory of autobiography, it did not seem all that attractive to undertake another book on autobiography. However, the project started to intrigue me when Dr. Gerlof suggested we publish the handbook in English and place it on the international book market. Having previously dealt mostly with German autobiographies and being familiar mainly with the Western tradition of the genre, the idea of thinking about autobiography in a global and hence transcultural perspective became more and more fascinating. I realized that I did not know anything about autobiographical forms in non-Western cultures and I started to reflect on the question of the extent to which the notion of ‘autobiography,’ at least in the way we perceive of it in the West, can be considered as a specific Western product. Of course, autobiographies have been and are being written all over the world. Being aware that cultural exchange and hybridity are common features of a globalized world, one has to ask what this means for the genre of autobiography, its different cultural contexts and historical features. These and other enthralling questions finally got the upper hand of my initial scepticism. So I accepted the challenge, although I have always been aware that it will be impossible to represent a genre as mutable as autobiography in a transhistorical global perspective. The idea that this project will allow and necessitate intensive collaboration with autobiography researchers from all over the world allayed the fears of failure. And of course, such a handbook combining all these different approaches – theory, history, and analyses of individual texts – does not yet exist and will be an invaluable tool for students and researchers alike. The handbook presents the historical and conceptual variety of the autobiographical genre in three volumes. The outline of volume one is theoretical and systematic. Its first section looks at autobiography from the perspective of different disciplines and theoretical approaches. Although literary studies have been investigating the form and historical appearance of autobiography extensively, other disciplines such as history, psychology, religious studies, etc. use autobiographies as sources and have developed their own concepts of the genre. In order to foster the interdisciplinary discussion on autobiography it seems to be important to represent the views and concepts of different disciplines. If a reader has the impression that an article on literary studies is missing from the list of disciplines in the section on “Theoretical Approaches,” however, this is certainly due to the blind spot of the editor’s own disciplinary background. For a literary scholar, the literary studies perspective constitutes the ‘norm,’ whereas ‘other’ fields are ‘added’ to make the picture complete. This unavoidable disciplinary centrism may be excused by referring to the different methodological approaches that are explained in this first section of volume one as well. They indicate, of course, not only the heterogeneity of approaches within literary