This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to ‘map’ the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.

• Foreword from the Editors 6
• Table of Contents 8
• Special Focus: “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing 12
• “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction 12
• Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World 22
• Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor in Kenny Fries’s The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory 38
• Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto 52
• About Vegetables and Depths in Life: Metaphors in the Autobiographical Work of Atte Jongstra 72
• Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir 90
• Language as Metaphor: Functions of Metalinguistic Reflection in European Migrants’ Life Writing 106
• ‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity – Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups and Laura Elise Tay 126
• “Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays 146
• General Section 164
• Fairytale Elements in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Man Who Loved Islands” 164
• Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House 190