Patrick Hayes, The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 7: Postwar to Contemporary, 1945–2020

This magnificent volume – the seventh to appear in the Oxford series under the general editorship of Zachary Leader – offers an interpretation of literary biographical writing from 1945 to 2020. It is, I think, best seen as a literary history of the period rather than a history of life writing strictu sensu: Patrick Hayes’s interests are unashamedly literary and his account of writing in which the biographical and autobiographical impulse appears is heavily skewed towards publications by canonical authors considered from the standpoint of literary scholarship. Although the volume unfolds in a loose chronological order, its twelve lengthy chapters are thematic and survey some of the most important trends shaping postwar biography and autobiography: anxieties over the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, the unconscious and its impact on self-knowledge, existentialism, coming out, feminism, hybridity and universalism, memory culture, posthumanism, literary biography, celebrity culture and the internet. If there is an underlying preoccupation linking them all, it is the resistance to theory Hayes finds in life writing of all kinds. Many of the authors whose works he surveys start off from some theoretical set of assumptions which they then come to question. Hayes is a lucid and humane expositor of a formidable array of these problematised positions. His own theoretical allegiances appear to be to psychoanalysis and Heideggerian existentialism, though he shines most brilliantly as a practical critic.