Dear World Contemporary Uses of the Diary [Paperback]

Where has the personal diary goneand what forms has it takenin the digital age? From the diary spaces of reality television and the how-to diary and its audience of self-helpers, in the emerging genre of the graphic diary or the online diaries of sex bloggers, in the published diaries of war correspondents or the urgent personal writing of Arab women under conflict, this book explores a new wave in diary publication and production. It also provides a fresh look at the diary as a contemporary form of autobiography.
??????????? InDear World, Kylie Cardell is sensitive to how changes to our notions of privacy and the personalspurred by the central presence the Internet has come to occupy in our daily livesimpact how and why diaries are written, and for whom. She considers what these new uses of the diary tell us about the cultural politics of self-representation in a time of mass attention to (and anxiety about) the personal. Cardell sees the twenty-first-century diary as a vibrant and popular cultural practice as much as a literary form, one that plays a key role in mass-mediated notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truth.Dear Worldprovides much-needed new attention to the innovation, evolution, and persistence of a familiar yet complex autobiographical mode.

Recent radical changes have altered the form and functions of the diary, from the confession diaries of reality television, how-to diaries, and graphic diaries to the published diaries of war correspondents, the urgent personal writing of Arab women under conflict, and the daily online postings of sex bloggers.

Dear Worldmarks a shift from a view of the diary as private writing to a focus on the diary, in published form, as a central part of popular culture. Leigh Gilmore, Harvard Divinity School

Many scholars in the field of life writing have been awaiting just such a critical study as Kylie Cardell's. Her work is highly original andl“7