Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Jennifer Traig
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-09-02
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780805087130
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"... You're invited to a roundtable discussion with today's most successful memoirists"--P. [4] of cover.
Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2019-01-29
Total Pages: 2198
ISBN-13: 3110279819
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAutobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
Author: Christopher Cowley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-10-26
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 022626808X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWe are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero—even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of “creative nonfiction” and “life writing” have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation. Cowley and his contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one’s life story or understand another’s. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues.
Author: Robert Folkenflik
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780804720489
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing primarily on the period from the eighteenth-century to the present, this interdisciplinary volume takes a fresh look at the institutions and practices of autobiography and self-portraiture in Europe, the United States and other cultures.
Author: Rachael McLennan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2012-11-26
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 0748644628
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first student guide to American autobiographys introduction to the major forms of autobiographical writing in America and important current developments in autobiography studies discusses both 'canonised' texts and those from contemporary writers. Taking a broadly chronological approach, the history of American autobiography is explored including the social and cultural factors that might account for the importance of autobiography in American culture. Then post-1970 autobiographies are examined, taking into account the development in poststructuralism from this time that affected notions of the subject who could write, and conceptions of truth, identity and reference.
Author: Paul Delany
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-08-14
Total Pages: 211
ISBN-13: 1317376218
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOriginally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term ‘autobiography’ existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as ‘Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions, etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings. The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings under two main headings – ‘religious’, where the autobiographies are grouped according to the denomination of their writer, and ‘secular’, where a wide variety of writings is examined, including accounts of travel and of military and political life, as well as more personal accounts. Autobiographies by women are treated separately, and the author shows that they in general have a deeper revelation of sentiments and more subtle self-analyses than is found in comparable works by men. Sources and influences are recorded and also the essential historical details of each work. This book gives a critical analysis of the autobiographies as literary works and suggests relationships between them and the culture and society of their time. Review of the original publication: "...a contribution to cultural history which is of quite exceptional merit. Its subject is of great intrinsic interest and manifest importance and Professor Delany has treated it with exemplary thoroughness, lucidity, and intelligence." Lionel Trilling
Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2005-05-09
Total Pages: 350
ISBN-13: 0226675432
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThough history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.
Author: Susan XU Yun
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2017-11-15
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 9027265100
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic fields, namely, autobiography, stylistics, narratology and translation studies. It shows that foregrounding is manifested in the language of autobiography, alerting readers to an authorial tone with certain ideological affiliations. In refuting the presumed conflation between the author, narrator and character in autobiography, the study emphasizes readers’ role in constructing an implied author. The issues of implied translator, assumed translation and rewriting are explored through a comparative analysis of the English and Chinese autobiographies by Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. The analysis identifies different foregrounding practices and attributes these differences to an implied translator. Further evidence derived from narrative-communicative situations in the two autobiographies underscores divergent personae of the implied authors. The study aims to establish a deeper understanding of how translation and rewriting have a far-reaching impact on the self- and world-making functions of autobiography. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics, literature, translation and political science.
Author: Rodger Milton Payne
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 142
ISBN-13: 9781572330153
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom about 1740 to 1850, evangelical Protestantism became a major cultural force in virtually all areas of America. Emerging from this religious movement was a rich vernacular literature of conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies--writings in which believers described their own salvation in hopes of converting others. In The Self and the Sacred, Rodger M. Payne examines these neglected texts in depth, focusing particularly on what they reveal about notions of selfhood and how those notions were incorporated into Christian orthodoxy. As Payne explains, conversion narratives point to a fascinating paradox that became evident among evangelicals as they were confronted by the disruptions and discontinuities marking their culture's passage into modernity. On the one hand, these narratives asserted the traditional Christian values of humility and self-effacement--an annihilation of the self in the divine. On the other hand, they created a discourse that allowed one to embrace the modern idea of an autonomous self: only by speaking from personal experience could a convert testify to the power of God. "Despite protests to the contrary," Payne writes, "the central character of any conversion account, spiritual diary, or spiritual autobiography was the convert, not God." Using the theology of Jonathan Edwards as a key example, Payne shows how Puritan piety encouraged the development of autobiographical spiritual narratives. He goes on to explain the ways in which the discourse of conversion functioned apart from the control of the church and marked the growth of evangelicalism into "a discursive community." Finally, he considers how the language of conversion functioned as a "rhetorical space" in which believers situated themselves individually within sacred space and time before turning back to society with a renewed regard for others. Drawing throughout on the insights of such theorists as Michel Foucault and Victor Turner, Payne's penetrating analysis reveals the early conversion accounts as mythic texts through which the modern self emerged. The Author: Rodger M. Payne is associate professor of religious studies at Louisiana State University. He is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Southern Religion, an electronic publication available on the World Wide Web.
Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 546
ISBN-13: 9780299158446
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.
