Focusing on works published in the late twentieth century by three contemporary postcolonial women writers, Sindiwe Magona, Sally Morgan and Janet Campbell Hale, this thesis explores their use of a hybrid generic form I term ‘intergenerational autobiography’. Originating from South Africa, Australia and North America respectively, each text engages with the legacy of colonialism in a different settler society. The authors interweave personal narratives with the life stories of mothers and grandmothers, and engage with the perspectives of future generations, incorporating familial subjectivities within autobiography in response to traumatic colonial pasts. Despite the widely disparate political and cultural contexts, detailed comparisons demonstrate how attacks on indigenous families function as key mechanisms of colonial control and oppression. Attention to the specificity of traumatic experience in each narrative necessitates a re-examination of models of trauma in non-Western contexts. Magona explores both everyday violence in apartheid South Africa, and the communal and generational impacts of individual ‘spectacular’ traumatic events. Morgan’s work foregrounds the vital collaborative role of the listener in trauma testimony, and highlights the significance of silences or gaps in testimonies about the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children in Australia. Hale vividly demonstrates the intergenerational transmission of trauma through maternal abuse in her Native American family, and throws into question the rebuilding of familial relationships as a discourse of healing. Each text is situated in relation to the historical narratives produced by truth and reconciliation commissions and other official testimony-gathering projects, exploring the freedom that intergenerational autobiography offers to address a broader spectrum of cross-generational experiences than is possible under the restrictive political objectives and mandates of TRCs. This literary form enables Magona, Morgan and Hale to produce politically nuanced narratives of the colonial past, accessing alternatives to ‘mainstream’ historical narratives through a generational approach that highlights the continuing traumatic impact of both spectacular and insidious forms of colonial violence.

Contemporary scholarship has seen increasing interest in the study of elegy. The present work attempts to elevate and expand discussions of death and survival beyond the ambit of elegy to a more genre-inclusive and ethically sensitive survey of Romantic posthumous life writings. Combining an ethic of remembrance founded on mutual fulfilment and reciprocal care with the Romantic tendency to hybridise different genres of mourning and commemoration, the study re- conceives 'posthumous life' as the 'inexhaustible' product of endless collaboration between the dead, the dying and the living. This thesis looks to the philosophical meditations of Francis Bacon, John Locke and Emmanuel Levinas for an ethical framework of human protection, fulfilment and preservation. In an effort to locate the origin of posthumous life writing, the first chapter examines the philosophical context in which different genres and media of commemoration emerged in the eighteenth century. Accordingly, it will commence with a survey of Enlightenment attitudes toward posthumous sympathy and the threat of death. The second part of the chapter turns to the tangled histories of epitaph, biography, portraiture, sepulchre and elegy in the writings of Samuel Johnson, Henry Kett, Vicesimus Knox, William Godwin and William Wordsworth. The Romantic culture of mourning and commemoration inherits the intellectual and generic legacies of the Enlightenment. Hence, Chapter Two will try to uncover the complex generic and formal crossovers between epitaph, extempore, effusion, elegy and biography in Wordsworth's 'Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg' (1835-7) and his 'Epitaph' (1835-7) for Charles Lamb. However, the chapter also recognises the ethical repercussions of Wordsworth's inadequate, even mortifying, treatment of a fellow woman writer in his otherwise successful expression of ethical remembrance. To address the problem of gender in Romantic memorialisation, Chapter Three will take a close look at Letitia Elizabeth Landon' s reply to Wordsworth's incompetent defence of Felicia Hemans. Mediating the ambitions and anxieties of her subject, as well as her public image and private pain, 'Felicia Hemans' (1838) is an audacious composite of autograph, epitaph, elegy, corrective biography and visual portraiture. The two closing chapters respond to Thomas Carlyle's outspoken confidence in 'Portraits and Letters' as indispensable aids to biographies. Chapter Four identifies a tentative connection between the aesthetic of visual portraiture and the ethic of life writing. To demonstrate the convergence of both artistic and humane principles, this cross-media analysis will first evaluate Sir Joshua Reynolds's memoirs of his deceased friends. Then, it will compare Wordsworth's and Hemans's verse reflections on the commemorative power and limitation of iconography. The last chapter assesses the role of private correspondence in the continuation of familiar relation and reciprocal support. Landon's dramatic enactment of a 'feminine Robinson Crusoe' in her letters from Africa urges the unbroken offering of service and remembrance to a fallen friend through posthumous correspondence. The concluding section will consider the ethical implications for the belated memorials and services furnished by friends and colleagues in the wake of her death.