Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images

This book offers new perspectives on text/image hybridity in the context of life writing. Each chapter explores the very topical issue of how writers and artists combine two media in order to enhance the autobiographical narrative and experience of the reader. It questions the position of images in relation to text, both on the page and in terms of the power balance between media. It also shows how hybridity operates beyond a semantic and cultural balance of power, as the combination of text and images are able to produce content that would not have been possible separately. Including a range of life writing and different visual media, from paintings and photography to graphic memoirs and social media, this edited collection investigates the point at which an image, whether fixed or moving, enters the autobiographical act and confronts the verbal form.

Arnaud Schmitt is a professor of American Studies at the University of Pau, France. His field of research is contemporary American literature and he has worked extensively on the concepts of autofiction and self-narration for almost two decades. His book, The Photographer as Autobiographer, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.