THIS BOOK HAS HIGHLIGHTED autobiographically motivated writing centering on illness/disability and dying as a neglected field of study in German literary and cultural scholarship. In response to this finding, it has demonstrated productive ways of reading this kind of literature, exemplifying in each chapter a number of approaches that could be taken further in the future.

Going against the tendency in the German-speaking world of regarding life writing as artless per se, and works centering on illness/disability as all the more so, this study brings the tools of literary studies to bear upon a selection of contemporary, personal narratives dealing with these themes from an inside perspective. In particular, it interrogates the ways authors capture their experiences in texts and how they negotiate positions of being in illness and of authorship in a cultural context that, until recently, has not seen a large number of publications telling personally of the lived experience of illness/disability including, sometimes, that of dying. By grounding the research in the field of disability studies, I have given the literary analysis of each individual text an innovative perspective, and, crucially, this has enabled me to identify gaps and contortions in the dominant readings of these texts, readings that often effectively disregard the illness experience at their center or contest the narrative's literary quality.

The research presented here found much of the political weight of a text to be carried by its formal features—which have typically been overlooked. For Charlotte Roche (chapter 1), for example, the choice of an autofictional representational mode must be read as governed by the need to reclaim agency over the story of her traumatic bereavement from the media without making herself vulnerable to fresh media intrusions and hurtful publicity. In Kathrin Schmidt's text (chapter 2), the narrative device of staring helps to fulfill the didactic aim of Du stirbst nicht to destabilize a readership's ableist and potentially disablist beliefs about illness/disability and conditions of speechlessness. For Verena Stefan, intertextuality becomes the crucial means in Fremdschläfer to align herself with the positions and values of feminist forerunners who negotiated illness publicly (chapter 3), while the text's Certeaudian poetics stresses the democratic relationship she as life writer strives for in regard to her readership.