HELGA LENART-CHENG

Lénárd Sándor: Világok Vándora (L'Harmattan, 2016) is the first book written on Sándor Lénárd, or Alexander Lenard (1910-1972), a fascinating polymath and polyglot best known for his translation of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh into Latin, but the three volumes of life-writing he published in the last decade of his career clearly deserve critical attention, as well. The two authors have both written about Lenard before. Zsuzsa Vajdovics has not only translated some of Lenard’s works from Hungarian into Italian and from Italian into Hungarian, she has also been active in helping to bring Lenard’s papers to Hungarian archives and in organizing a Lenard Seminar, and later a Lenard Society, in Budapest. Her co-authored book with Helga Lénárt-Cheng draws on their previously published work (e.g., in this journal's vol. 7, 2014, Lénárt-Cheng's article: https://ahea.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ahea/article/view/3), but this is a more inclusive monograph that aims to encompass Lenard's entire oeuvre and provide a starting point for further scholarship on his work. After a biographical overview (13-45), the two authors survey Lenard's writings by genre (46-121), discuss his other activities (122-137), and conclude with an appendix of illustrations, a bibliography, and a list of Lenard’s correspondents. (Reviewed by András Kiséry).

Publisher's website: https://harmattan.hu/vilagok-vandora

Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age (Virginia University Press, 2022) explores the role of personal storytelling in democracy. Two decades into the twenty-first century, the collective sharing of personal stories is on the rise. The Moth, StoryCorps, #metoo or Humans of New York attract millions of users, not to mention the so-called “story products” recently introduced by social media companies with nearly a billion users. We are on the cusp of a new era in which personal stories will play a key role in social and political engagement. The book traces the connection between personal stories and democracy back to the Enlightenment. It focuses on three historical periods­­––the Enlightenment, the 1930s, and the 21st century––because all three were marked by a convergence of mass movements and new methods of data collection and aggregation, which led to a boom in story activism. Story Revolutions presents a variety of case studies from eighteenth-century memoir-collections to contemporary Web 2.0 databases, including memoir contests, oral history, digital story-maps, and crowd-sourced pandemic diaries. Ultimately, the book offers a critical perspective on the concept of community, with reflections on what it means to use storytelling to build democracy in the twenty-first century. 

Publisher's website: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5758/

Un/Bound (Routledge, 2024) is a collection of essays about mobility, border metaphors and the ethical issues of cross-border storytelling. Life writing often explores the profound impact of border crossings, both physical and metaphorical. Writers navigate personal and cultural boundaries, reflecting on identity, belonging, and the transformative power of crossing thresholds. These narratives unveil the complexities of migration, immigration, or internal journeys, offering intimate perspectives on adapting to new environments or confronting internal conflicts. Un/Bound is a collection of essays about such narratives, with an emphasis on mobility and border metaphors, the ethical dimensions of cross-border storytelling, and questions of access, translation, and circulation. Scholarly interest in borders, mobility, and related topics has greatly intensified in the context of public health emergencies and recent conflicts in international relations. The chapters in this book contribute to this dialogue by exploring internal and external, and physical and abstract borders and divisions. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, translation studies and political philosophy. 

Publisher's website: https://www.routledge.com/UnBound/Brown-Lenart-Cheng/p/book/9781032774749

We live in the age of popular self-representation in that most people around the globe either produce or consume autobiographical material: memoirs, selfies, blogs, etc. The current volume investigates this global phenomenon and examines how life writing and world literature converge. Why do some personal stories get “picked up,” translated, circulated, and taught in classrooms, while others remain moored in local waters? Do autobiographical stories that travel widely have something in common about them? Or is it the other way around, is it our notion of “world literature” that imposes uniform expectations on these diverse texts? And what can we gain from studying these two fields in conjunction?

Life Writing as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) brings together experts who map regional and local autobiographical traditions from six continents. These scholars explore the dynamic interplay between local and global aesthetics and sociopolitical concerns, presenting case studies that include prison narratives from communist regimes, Japanese diaries, multilingual Caribbean memoirs, Indian auto/biographical comics, and stories by Taiwanese domestic workers.

Life Writing as World Literature brings a fresh perspective to both fields – world literature and life writing – opening up exciting avenues of research.

Publisher's website: www.bloomsbury.com/us/life-writing-as-world-literature-9798765107119/