Digital lockdown diaries and the reconfiguration of autobiographical subjectivity during COVID-19

This article argues that pandemic digital diaries reshape autobiography as a relational, networked, and ethically charged form of life writing during crisis. Situating COVID-19 lockdown narratives within life writing, digital humanities, and pandemic humanities, showing how these texts challenge individualist models grounded in retrospective narration. Through analyses of Wuhan Diary, The Premonition, and Psychoanalytic Diaries of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the article explores real-time narration, uncertainty, shared identities, and redistributed narrative authority across digital platforms and communities. Pandemic diaries transform the autobiographical “I” into a dialogic construct, emphasizing responsiveness, ethical responsibility, collective experience, and changing authority of writers over their stories.