An exploration of contemporary life writing's dependence on different variants of the archive, this book examines the notion of the self-archive and how the modern emerging auto/biographical subject resists traditional narrative coherence and takes the form of a repository of self-contained elements.

An answer to the trend of biographers and auto-biographers to increasingly eschew narrative to accentuate the fragmentary character and nature of experience – the tendency to 'store' rather than 'story' the self – Self-Archives in Contemporary Life Writing defines the self-archive as an arrangement of auto-biographical material. From recollections and personal documentation to objects owned, these archives all posess components that have been selected, sorted, and placed alongside one another according to a specific system.

With each building block of the self-archive fragmentary and disconnected, author Wojciech Drag makes the case that so is the auto/biographical subject fragmented, unstable and elusive, defined by the data and objects they consume. With 20 experimental works of life writing considered, from Roland Barthes's auto-encyclopaedia to a digital biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the book draws from case studies from over the last 50 years, by authors from the US, the UK, Canada, France and Poland. Divided into sections devoted to texts that rely on the alphabet for their structure (the encyclopaedia, the bibliography and the index) and formats that favour arbitrary order (the list, the inventory, the portfolio and the database), this book puts forward new vehicles for the auto-biographical mode.