18 books like Life Writing and Victorian Culture
Postcolonial theory and autobiography
Cultural theory has often been criticized for covert Eurocentric and universalist tendencies. Its concepts and ideas are implicitly applicable to everyone, ironing over any individuality or cultural difference. Postcolonial theory has challenged these limitations of cultural theory, and Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography addresses the central challenge posed by its autobiographical…
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Mediating Memory
The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of…
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Aspects de la biographie
« Y a-t-il une biographie moderne ? Est-elle une forme littéraire différente de la biographie traditionnelle ? Les méthodes qu'elle a suivies sont-elles légitimes, ou au contraire faut-il y renoncer ? La biographie doit-elle être un art ou une science ? Peut-elle être, comme le roman, un moyen d'expression, une délivrance pour l'auteur comme pour le lecteur ? Voilà quelques-uns des problèmes que…
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Victorian writing about risk
"In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on politic economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and…
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English biography before 1700
Meet Zoe Richards, the new kid at West End Elementary. She enjoys spending lunchtime with her two new friends, Felix and Victoria. But there's this other kid named Joshua who always sits by himself. Zoe wonders if she should make friends with him. Felix says Joshua is a cool guy, but Victoria thinks Joshua is weird. What should Zoe do?Growing up on the autism spectrum, I had a…
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Selfless Ego
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Drawing from life
Meet Jerry Mathers, who, though resembling the middle-aged “Beaver,” bears no other relation, having been born in the 1970s when that illusion of American life was almost a decade dead. His mother, widowed by the Vietnam War, endured many years as a Woolworth’s clerk to bring Jerry up in a “nice neighborhood,” enabling him to go to college and fulfill his dreams of being an artist... at least…
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Life Writing after Empire
A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the post-imperial condition through the practice of life writing in its multifarious expressions, from…
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Victorian Diary
In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication…
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Autobiographical Writing and Identity in EFL Education
The book explores the pedagogical potential of autobiographical writing in English-as-a-foreign language, approaching the topic from an educational, longitudinal, dialogical, and social perspective. Through a number of case studies, the author delineates four phases that EFL writers may experience in their identity construction processes, illustrating the complexity of EFL writers’ social…
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Poetics of Arabic Autobiography
This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the "self"—the "auto" of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although…
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Auto/Biography Across the Americas
Auto/biographical narratives of the Americas are marked by the underlying themes of movement and belonging. This collection proposes that the impact of the historic or contemporary movement of peoples to, in, and from the Americas—whether chosen or forced—motivates the ways in which identities are constructed in this contested space. Such movement results in a cyclical quest to belong, and to…
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Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing
Juxtaposing life writing and romance, this study offers the first book-length exploration of the dynamic and complex relationship between the two genres. Through close analysis of a wide variety of life writings by early modern Englishwomen, Eckerle shows how deeply influenced these women were by the controversial romance genre. Her analysis adds a layer of significant nuance to our understanding…
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The situation and the story
"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.".
"How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable…
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Autobiographics in Freud and Derrida
Originally published in 1990. This uniquely fascinating study approaches the problem of autobiography from two directions: first assessing theories of the self, consciousness and language developed by both Freud and Derrida; second through the reading of the autobiographical aspects of their writings. The book begins with looking at the issue of making sense of a life by means of representation,…
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Inscribed Identities
Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by…
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Life Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe
This book explores the unique contributions of various forms of post-2000 life-writings such as the autobiography, epistles, and biographies, to discourses about the nature and socio-politics of what has become known as the Zimbabwean crisis (c. 2000–2009).Much of what has been written about the Zimbabwean crisis – a decade-long period of unprecedented economic collapse and political upheavals in…
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Modern selves
This book discusses gender and autobiography, and the politics of autobiography. It offers examples of ways of making sense of individual works or groups of works.
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