Abstract: “Life Writing: A Powerful New Genre” gives a brief overview of the history and growth of life writing and the major methodologies that have emerged. In the next section, that life writing has become a distinct genre is illustrated. The essay concludes with a discussion of some of the issues and controversies surrounding the practice and publication of life writing.  Among these are the relationships between biography and autobiography and between the strategies of life-writers and those of fiction writers. Another issue is the explosive development of thematic biographies and other kinds of biographies that are not intended to be “whole lives,” all of which depend to some extent on the methods of life-writers.

Key words: biomythography; biography; autobiography

Paula R. Backscheider is Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar at Auburn University and a former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Author of several books and many articles, her most recent book is Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013). Her Daniel Defoe: His Life won the British Council Prize and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry received the MLA Lowell Prize.