Ilaria Serra
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226788
- eISBN:
- 9780823235032
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226788.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words”, making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and ...
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The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words”, making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold. In this innovative portrait of the Italian–American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. The book offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants. It looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration. Scouring archives, discovering diaries and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, the book recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often heavily accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of work, survival, identity, and change. Moving between history and literature, the book presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.Less
The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words”, making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold. In this innovative portrait of the Italian–American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. The book offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants. It looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration. Scouring archives, discovering diaries and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, the book recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often heavily accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of work, survival, identity, and change. Moving between history and literature, the book presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.
Moses N. Moore, Jr.
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195167979
- eISBN:
- 9780199784981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019516797X.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
Autobiographical narratives and related materials such as journals and diaries have proved to be valuable, but often problematic, resources for the studying and teaching of African American religious ...
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Autobiographical narratives and related materials such as journals and diaries have proved to be valuable, but often problematic, resources for the studying and teaching of African American religious experiences. This chapter identifies a number of these resources and illustrates some of the historiographical and pedagogical issues related to their use. In this chapter, “testifying” alludes to the confessional tradition within the black religious experience and is used in reference to the “subjective” self-representations, interpretations, and experiences found in autobiographical narratives and related materials. “Testimony”, meanwhile, has more “factual” connotations and refers to resources and interpretations that are ostensibly more “objective” and hence subject to critical historical assessment. Both types of material are presented as valid, valuable, and complementary resources for studying the African American religious experience. This chapter also includes pedagogical reflections on varied classroom experiences that incorporate both types of resources in courses situated in two university departments of religious studies.Less
Autobiographical narratives and related materials such as journals and diaries have proved to be valuable, but often problematic, resources for the studying and teaching of African American religious experiences. This chapter identifies a number of these resources and illustrates some of the historiographical and pedagogical issues related to their use. In this chapter, “testifying” alludes to the confessional tradition within the black religious experience and is used in reference to the “subjective” self-representations, interpretations, and experiences found in autobiographical narratives and related materials. “Testimony”, meanwhile, has more “factual” connotations and refers to resources and interpretations that are ostensibly more “objective” and hence subject to critical historical assessment. Both types of material are presented as valid, valuable, and complementary resources for studying the African American religious experience. This chapter also includes pedagogical reflections on varied classroom experiences that incorporate both types of resources in courses situated in two university departments of religious studies.
James Hinton
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199574667
- eISBN:
- 9780191702167
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574667.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Social History
This book provides a fascinating re-evaluation of the social history of the Second World War and the 20th century making of the modern self. Using the wartime diaries of nine individuals, the book ...
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This book provides a fascinating re-evaluation of the social history of the Second World War and the 20th century making of the modern self. Using the wartime diaries of nine individuals, the book illuminates the impact of war on attitudes to citizenship, the changing relationships between men and women, and the search for meaning in a wartime context of limitless violence. The diaries from which this book is derived were written by some of the unusually self-reflective and public-spirited people who agreed to write intimate journals about their daily activity for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Each in their way is vivid, interesting and surprising. One of the nine diarists discussed is Nella Last, whose published diaries have been a source of delight and fascination for thousands of readers. A central insight underpins the book: in seeking to make the best of our own lives, each of us makes selective use of the resources of our shared culture in a unique way; in so doing, we contribute, however modestly, to molecular processes of historical change. The book resists nostalgic contrasts between the presumed dutiful citizenship of wartime Britain and contemporary anti-social individualism, pointing instead to longer-run processes of change, rooted as much in struggles for personal autonomy in the private sphere, as in the politics of active citizenship in public life.Less
This book provides a fascinating re-evaluation of the social history of the Second World War and the 20th century making of the modern self. Using the wartime diaries of nine individuals, the book illuminates the impact of war on attitudes to citizenship, the changing relationships between men and women, and the search for meaning in a wartime context of limitless violence. The diaries from which this book is derived were written by some of the unusually self-reflective and public-spirited people who agreed to write intimate journals about their daily activity for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Each in their way is vivid, interesting and surprising. One of the nine diarists discussed is Nella Last, whose published diaries have been a source of delight and fascination for thousands of readers. A central insight underpins the book: in seeking to make the best of our own lives, each of us makes selective use of the resources of our shared culture in a unique way; in so doing, we contribute, however modestly, to molecular processes of historical change. The book resists nostalgic contrasts between the presumed dutiful citizenship of wartime Britain and contemporary anti-social individualism, pointing instead to longer-run processes of change, rooted as much in struggles for personal autonomy in the private sphere, as in the politics of active citizenship in public life.
Matthew M. Briones
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691129488
- eISBN:
- 9781400842216
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691129488.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was ...
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Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.Less
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.
Barbara Lounsberry
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780813062952
- eISBN:
- 9780813051833
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813062952.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s second diary stage: her spare, modernist diaries written from 1918 to 1929. These thirteen middle diary books are ...
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Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s second diary stage: her spare, modernist diaries written from 1918 to 1929. These thirteen middle diary books are explored in depth and Woolf's development as a diarist traced across what is often called her modernist golden age when she wrote her most famous works: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and the first Common Reader. Woolf turns her semiprivate diary into a lean, inward-searching journal and practice ground for these great modernist works. The book offers close readings of each of the thirteen diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other diaries; and (3) as it intersects her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) Woolf's Modernist Path also offers a new approach to Woolf biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 49. Here is Woolf at mid-life. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. Interwoven as she read them are fourteen key diaries—including those of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Beatrice Webb—that helped shape both Woolf's semiprivate diary and her public prose.Less
Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s second diary stage: her spare, modernist diaries written from 1918 to 1929. These thirteen middle diary books are explored in depth and Woolf's development as a diarist traced across what is often called her modernist golden age when she wrote her most famous works: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and the first Common Reader. Woolf turns her semiprivate diary into a lean, inward-searching journal and practice ground for these great modernist works. The book offers close readings of each of the thirteen diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other diaries; and (3) as it intersects her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) Woolf's Modernist Path also offers a new approach to Woolf biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 49. Here is Woolf at mid-life. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. Interwoven as she read them are fourteen key diaries—including those of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Beatrice Webb—that helped shape both Woolf's semiprivate diary and her public prose.
Emily Van Buskirk
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691166797
- eISBN:
- 9781400873777
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691166797.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter undertakes a treatment of the rhetoric of personal pronouns in Ginzburg's writings on love and sexuality, drawing on Michael Lucey's study of the first person in twentieth-century French ...
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This chapter undertakes a treatment of the rhetoric of personal pronouns in Ginzburg's writings on love and sexuality, drawing on Michael Lucey's study of the first person in twentieth-century French literature about love. It brings together questions of genre and narrative, on the one hand, and gender and sexuality, on the other. The chapter is divided into two sections, treating writings from two different periods on two kinds of love Ginzburg thought typical of intellectuals: in “First Love,” it discusses the unrequited and tragic love depicted in Ginzburg's teenage diaries (1920–23); in “Second Love,” it analyzes the love that is realized but in the end equally tragic, depicted in drafts related to Home and the World (1930s). The chapter examines the models the author sought in literary, psychological, and philosophical texts (Weininger, Kraft-Ebbing, Blok, Shklovsky, Oleinikov, Hemingway, and Proust).Less
This chapter undertakes a treatment of the rhetoric of personal pronouns in Ginzburg's writings on love and sexuality, drawing on Michael Lucey's study of the first person in twentieth-century French literature about love. It brings together questions of genre and narrative, on the one hand, and gender and sexuality, on the other. The chapter is divided into two sections, treating writings from two different periods on two kinds of love Ginzburg thought typical of intellectuals: in “First Love,” it discusses the unrequited and tragic love depicted in Ginzburg's teenage diaries (1920–23); in “Second Love,” it analyzes the love that is realized but in the end equally tragic, depicted in drafts related to Home and the World (1930s). The chapter examines the models the author sought in literary, psychological, and philosophical texts (Weininger, Kraft-Ebbing, Blok, Shklovsky, Oleinikov, Hemingway, and Proust).
Rivkah Zim
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691161808
- eISBN:
- 9781400852093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691161808.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve ...
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This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve details of their lives because they believed that writing about their ideas, experiences, and feelings would help to sustain them in the exceptional circumstances of confinement. Both writers also became popular heroines: their prison writings have been continuously in print since shortly after their deaths. Yet their personal memoirs of different kinds have been read and valued as historic witness accounts of wider, catastrophic events: the French Revolution and the Holocaust. Both writers were conscious of their roles as historic witnesses, but the chapter seeks to refocus attention on their ideas of themselves as writers and the primary functions of their texts as literary testimony to unique personal identities rather than the historic victims of terror they came to represent for later readers.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve details of their lives because they believed that writing about their ideas, experiences, and feelings would help to sustain them in the exceptional circumstances of confinement. Both writers also became popular heroines: their prison writings have been continuously in print since shortly after their deaths. Yet their personal memoirs of different kinds have been read and valued as historic witness accounts of wider, catastrophic events: the French Revolution and the Holocaust. Both writers were conscious of their roles as historic witnesses, but the chapter seeks to refocus attention on their ideas of themselves as writers and the primary functions of their texts as literary testimony to unique personal identities rather than the historic victims of terror they came to represent for later readers.
William St Clair
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Numerous literary biographies of famous authors were normally shaped by the quantity and the nature of the surviving primary documentary evidences such as diaries, letters, notes of constructions, ...
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Numerous literary biographies of famous authors were normally shaped by the quantity and the nature of the surviving primary documentary evidences such as diaries, letters, notes of constructions, and descriptions of the commentaries. These sources not only shaped the nature of the biographies but also the biographical method adopted. This chapter discusses the nature of the biographical evidence. It examines how biographers who regard their work primarily as an historical investigation can deal with the hard and immovable fact that the sources on which they necessarily rely are normally likely to provide an unrepresentative record of the patterns of the lived life.Less
Numerous literary biographies of famous authors were normally shaped by the quantity and the nature of the surviving primary documentary evidences such as diaries, letters, notes of constructions, and descriptions of the commentaries. These sources not only shaped the nature of the biographies but also the biographical method adopted. This chapter discusses the nature of the biographical evidence. It examines how biographers who regard their work primarily as an historical investigation can deal with the hard and immovable fact that the sources on which they necessarily rely are normally likely to provide an unrepresentative record of the patterns of the lived life.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ...
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This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.
MICHAEL FREEDEN
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263938
- eISBN:
- 9780191734236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263938.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Henry Colin Gray Matthew, historian and editor, will forever be associated with two of the most grandiose and ambitious publishing projects to be conceived and executed in the United Kingdom in the ...
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Henry Colin Gray Matthew, historian and editor, will forever be associated with two of the most grandiose and ambitious publishing projects to be conceived and executed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century: The Gladstone Diaries and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Like all previous biographers of Gladstone, Matthew addressed the Grand Old Man's mutation from Tory to enlightened Liberal. However, he did so in a wholly original manner, by uncovering the crises and agonised introspection that not only accompanied, but preceded, the many moves in that direction, as if primordial psychological forces had gripped Gladstone from which he had to seek relief in decisive political action. The triumph of the Gladstone diaries paved the way for another opportunity bathed in even more luminous national prestige. In 1992, Matthew was asked to take on a joint project of the British Academy and OUP: a complete revision of the Dictionary of National Biography (ultimately published as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). He brought not only a natural leadership but a fresh vision of the contents, scope, and contributors.Less
Henry Colin Gray Matthew, historian and editor, will forever be associated with two of the most grandiose and ambitious publishing projects to be conceived and executed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century: The Gladstone Diaries and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Like all previous biographers of Gladstone, Matthew addressed the Grand Old Man's mutation from Tory to enlightened Liberal. However, he did so in a wholly original manner, by uncovering the crises and agonised introspection that not only accompanied, but preceded, the many moves in that direction, as if primordial psychological forces had gripped Gladstone from which he had to seek relief in decisive political action. The triumph of the Gladstone diaries paved the way for another opportunity bathed in even more luminous national prestige. In 1992, Matthew was asked to take on a joint project of the British Academy and OUP: a complete revision of the Dictionary of National Biography (ultimately published as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). He brought not only a natural leadership but a fresh vision of the contents, scope, and contributors.
