Sarah Herbe Knihy

Autobiographies are among the bestselling books in Britain, and beside the book format, other forms of autobiographical expression such as blogging and vlogging flourish, too. As a response to this ‘autobiography boom’ since the late 20th century, the study of life writing has developed into a vibrant field of research. Although there have been many British contributions to the field, a collection that assembles critical views on the variety of contemporary British autobiographical writing has still been missing. This volume cannot close this gap and provide a comprehensive overview on recent British autobiography but brings together exemplary studies of different media, forms and issues of British autobiographical writing, testifying to the creativity and diversity of both autobiographical texts and analytical angles. Contributions focus predominantly on non-canonical texts, including some of the most popular contemporary autobiographical genres, such as graphic memoirs, fan autobiographies, disability memoirs, or blogs, addressing, for example, questions of genre, ethics and identity as well as ideas for teaching.

Hard science fiction, a sub-genre of science fiction that is especially based on scientific plausibility and extrapolation, has experienced a renaissance from the mid-1990s onwards. The present study deals with a corpus of new hard science fiction novels by British writers published between 1995 and 2004, focusing on three series by Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds and Brian Stableford. It offers a thematic-narratological approach. Thematically, the focus is on human genetic engineering; a topic that has only recently been fully accepted into the repertory of hard science fiction themes. This thematic focus is combined with a focus on the presentation of characters. The study explores the strategies employed to create plausible characters in new hard science fiction, discusses how the physical constructedness of characters is mirrored on a textual level, and examines how the distribution of knowledge about and access to genetic engineering stratifies the population of future societies.