Autobiography, Ecology, and the Well-Placed Self: The Growth of Natural Biography in Contemporary American Life Writing

Straight (English, Utah State U.-Brigham City) contributes to the growing scholarship on autobiography by looking for a central focus for reading the genre and a set of organizing principles that are coherent enough to be useful yet flexible enough to encompass the range of actual writing. He discusses self and place in dialogue, William Kittredge's Great Basin reckonings, Terry Tempest Williams' fluid subjectivity, Mary Clearman Blew's collective identity, and diverse narratives of the well-placed self. Annotation 穢2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)