1. This book is a comprehensive look at the diary as a genre, edited by a leading folklore scholar in genre studies and a leading scholar in autobiographical life writing. 2. It includes essays by all of the major scholars of autobiographical non-fiction writing. 3. This book serves as a useful cross-disciplinary tool that brings together work that has been done on the diary in a variety of disciplines over the past few decades and thus will appeal to historians, literature scholars, and anyone interested in genre studies.