Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

Investigates the use of plays as a form of autobiography, looking at how the line between real-life and fiction can become blurred.

This groundbreaking exploration of a wide range of contemporary theorists and playwrights covers an extraordinary breadth of styles and performances.

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers--Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah--tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

This unique book contains the never-before-published script of the first ever one-woman show, written by Fanny Kelly. The script was performed in Britain in the 1830s and '40s, based on Kelly’s own experiences and offers a picture of the exuberant and often bizarre Georgian entertainment world. The performance text is introduced, edited, and explained by Gilli Bush-Bailey, who focuses 21st-century revisionist scholarship on Kelly’s story. It is an innovative contribution to the modern debate on biographical and autobiographical writing, while also serving as a valuable text for those who wish to study comedy and women’s performance. The materials and methods of the modern stand-up routine are already to be seen in this unusual text. This book will appeal to students and scholars who are involved in performance, theater history, or biography. It is also an accessible text for the interested general reader.

Charts the ways that woman artists have represented themselves and their life stories

Offering a comprehensive overview of the use of autobiography in performance, this title uncovers the political potentials and limits that accompany the use of the personal in performance.

In Performing Autobiography, Jenn Stephenson presents an innovative new approach to autobiography studies that links the growing field of research to drama. Stephenson’s analysis engages with performance histories to demonstrate the extent to which the dramatic form, which recasts autobiography as ambiguously fictive, ensures that the experience of the plays remains open to revision, alteration, and interpretation. As such, Performing Autobiography understands this form not to be the impossible documentation of the backward-looking narrative of one’s life, but rather an evolving process of self-creation and transformation. Stephenson explores the autobiographical form by analysing seven works by Canadian playwrights written and performed between 1999 and 2009, including Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, Daniel MacIvor’s In On It, and Timothy Findley’s Shadows. Her analysis encourages us to see autobiography as a uniquely political act, one that, where enacted on stage, illustrates the variety of ways that self-reflection and interpretation has an expanding role in contemporary culture.

Nasser Hussain was acclaimed as England's best cricket captain since Mike Brearley. Under his leadership, a side more famous for its batting collapses and ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory discovered its backbone. With coach Duncan Fletcher he put some steel into the side; they became a difficult team to beat. Hussain wore his heart on his sleeve: railing against complacency, defying critics of his place in the batting line-up and making a principled stand at the last World Cup when the ECB seemed incapable of it. Expect passion, integrity, insight and candour in his eagerly awaited autobiography.

A teen idol of the 1950s who virtually invented the singer/songwriter/heartthrob combination that still tops pop music today, Paul Anka rocketed to fame with a slew of hits-from "Diana" to "Put Your Head on my Shoulder"-that earned him a place touring with the major stars of his era, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly. He wrote Holly's last hit, and just missed joining the rocker on his final, fatal plane flight. Anka also stepped in front of the camera in the teen beach-party movie era, scoring the movies and romancing their starlets, including Annette Funicello. When the British invasion made his fans swoon for a new style of music-and musician--Anka made sure he wasn't conquered. A rapier-canny businessman and image-builder who took his career into his own hands-just as he had from the very beginning, swiping his mother's car at fourteen to drive himself, underage, to his first gigs in Quebec-Anka toured the world until he could return home in triumph. A charter member of the Rat Pack, he wrote the theme music for The Tonight Show as well as his friend Frank Sinatra's anthem "My Way". By the 1970s, a multi-decade string of pop chart-toppers, including "Puppy Love" and "(You're) Having My Baby", cemented his status as an icon. My Way is bursting with rich, rollicking stories of the business and the people in Anka's life: Elizabeth Taylor, Dodi Fayed, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Adnan Khashoggi, Little Richard, Brooke Shields, Johnny Roselli, Sammy Davis, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Barnum & Bailey Circus acrobats, and many more. Anka is forthcoming, funny and smart as a whip about the business he's been in for almost six decades. My Way moves from New York to Vegas, from the casino stage to backstages all over the world. It's the most entertaining autobiography of the year.