Birth and Death: Writing the Edges of Life

Birth and death may be the only certainties in life. Yet in life writing, the task of representing birth and death is an uncertain one. They are fundamental events but are also, in many ways, quite untellable. This is no less true of the mid-life event of giving birth. This article introduces Birth and Death: Writing the Edges of Life, a special issue examining how life writing strains at its own limits to attend to the challenges of writing the limits of life. Framed in relation to the dual concepts of strangeness and familiarity in translation scholarship, this introduction traces through the fourteen papers in the collection several notably creative approaches adopted in the face of birth, birthing and death, with fragmentation, plurality, intertextuality and authorial ambiguity especially prominent.