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.
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.
Tiphaine Samoyault
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of ...
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This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of Barthes; second, it derives from a part of Barthes’s writing he kept separate from the rest. This part is called ‘ordinary’ because it corresponds to those modest gestures of writing we all share: writing letters, postcards, to-do lists, notes, messages, or shopping lists. In Barthes, it is a kind of writing cut off from the rest, but that silently accompanies literary or intellectual production. His early habit of methodically recording his academic research on fiches develops into the production of the enormous self-archive he maintained all his life, a repository of things seen, read, and heard, of thoughts and projects, of impressions of places and people, of quotations he liked, or of bedside scribbles. This fichier is a malleable form absorbing all forms of ordinary writing, a kind of hypertextual document allowing flexibility for infinite redistribution, and the chapter concludes with discussion of Barthes’s diary-writing practice and its relation to the tenacious reworking of notes, plans, and fiches for the projected ‘novel’ he called Vita nova.Less
This chapter presents a picture of Barthes that for two reasons has not been written about before: first, it comes from the archive the author was able to explore whilst preparing a biography of Barthes; second, it derives from a part of Barthes’s writing he kept separate from the rest. This part is called ‘ordinary’ because it corresponds to those modest gestures of writing we all share: writing letters, postcards, to-do lists, notes, messages, or shopping lists. In Barthes, it is a kind of writing cut off from the rest, but that silently accompanies literary or intellectual production. His early habit of methodically recording his academic research on fiches develops into the production of the enormous self-archive he maintained all his life, a repository of things seen, read, and heard, of thoughts and projects, of impressions of places and people, of quotations he liked, or of bedside scribbles. This fichier is a malleable form absorbing all forms of ordinary writing, a kind of hypertextual document allowing flexibility for infinite redistribution, and the chapter concludes with discussion of Barthes’s diary-writing practice and its relation to the tenacious reworking of notes, plans, and fiches for the projected ‘novel’ he called Vita nova.
Lucy Noakes
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266663
- eISBN:
- 9780191905384
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266663.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The Second World War saw the conscription and mobilisation of around 5.8 million British men for military service. Very few had any prior military experience or training. This chapter looks at some ...
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The Second World War saw the conscription and mobilisation of around 5.8 million British men for military service. Very few had any prior military experience or training. This chapter looks at some of the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by men serving in the Army to consider how they tried to construct a new, militarised sense of identity, and the emotional styles that they used to communicate this. Letters, diaries, and memoirs provided a resource for both the expression of emotions that could not be articulated in the military community, and for the process of fashioning a new militarised selfhood. Drawing on work undertaken by historians working on the construction of selfhood, the chapter examines a range of these documents to consider the ways that men constructed and articulated this new militarised identity, and the emotional styles that they utilised to do so. However, war provided multiple challenges to these new, hybrid, identities, none more so than the threat of death, or the death of friends and comrades. The chapter concludes by considering the emotional styles that some men used to record their encounters with death, and the ways that these encounters could destabilise their new, militarised, selfhoods.Less
The Second World War saw the conscription and mobilisation of around 5.8 million British men for military service. Very few had any prior military experience or training. This chapter looks at some of the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by men serving in the Army to consider how they tried to construct a new, militarised sense of identity, and the emotional styles that they used to communicate this. Letters, diaries, and memoirs provided a resource for both the expression of emotions that could not be articulated in the military community, and for the process of fashioning a new militarised selfhood. Drawing on work undertaken by historians working on the construction of selfhood, the chapter examines a range of these documents to consider the ways that men constructed and articulated this new militarised identity, and the emotional styles that they utilised to do so. However, war provided multiple challenges to these new, hybrid, identities, none more so than the threat of death, or the death of friends and comrades. The chapter concludes by considering the emotional styles that some men used to record their encounters with death, and the ways that these encounters could destabilise their new, militarised, selfhoods.
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.
Alex Belsey
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620290
- eISBN:
- 9781789623574
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620290.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was ...
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The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Commenced in the summer of 1939 as war across Europe seemed inevitable, Vaughan’s journal was a space in which he could articulate ideas about politics, art, love and sex during a period of great political and personal upheaval. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by life-writing, specifically journal and diary forms, to make such constructions possible.Less
The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Commenced in the summer of 1939 as war across Europe seemed inevitable, Vaughan’s journal was a space in which he could articulate ideas about politics, art, love and sex during a period of great political and personal upheaval. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by life-writing, specifically journal and diary forms, to make such constructions possible.
Ruth Solie
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520238459
- eISBN:
- 9780520930063
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520238459.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping ...
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Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, this book examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. The chapters fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This book mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people—English and others—experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. The chapters cover topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes—including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility—and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.Less
Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, this book examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. The chapters fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This book mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people—English and others—experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. The chapters cover topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes—including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility—and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.
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.
KATHRYN GLEADLE
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260201.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Economic History
This chapter analyses the diaries of a late 18th-century gentlewoman, Katherine Plymley, and her wide network to understand the complex and often conflicting ways in which women were able to ...
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This chapter analyses the diaries of a late 18th-century gentlewoman, Katherine Plymley, and her wide network to understand the complex and often conflicting ways in which women were able to construct themselves as members of civil society. A consideration of the ways in which the home could be invested with wider political and civil significance forms the basis of this chapter. In order to analyse the gendered processes involved, and the implications of this relationship between the home and the ‘public sphere’ for women, the cultural politics of conversation is considered.Less
This chapter analyses the diaries of a late 18th-century gentlewoman, Katherine Plymley, and her wide network to understand the complex and often conflicting ways in which women were able to construct themselves as members of civil society. A consideration of the ways in which the home could be invested with wider political and civil significance forms the basis of this chapter. In order to analyse the gendered processes involved, and the implications of this relationship between the home and the ‘public sphere’ for women, the cultural politics of conversation is considered.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter considers the stratagems used by well-known writers to ensure a favourable image after death: by nominating a trusted family member or otherwise discreet individual to compose an ...
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This chapter considers the stratagems used by well-known writers to ensure a favourable image after death: by nominating a trusted family member or otherwise discreet individual to compose an exemplary biography; by destroying correspondence and weeding papers; by self-consciously unburdening themselves to select intimates; by encouraging societies dedicated to their memory; and by keeping a diary or issuing autobiographical reflections. Writers who endeavoured to take such precautions, with incomplete success, include Robert Louis Stevenson, D. G. Rossetti, George Eliot, Henry James, the Brownings, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Tennyson. The difficulties encountered by guardians of writers' reputations are illuminated by reference to Edmund Gosse, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sidney Colvin, J.G. Lockhart, Mrs Gaskell, J. A. Froude, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie.Less
This chapter considers the stratagems used by well-known writers to ensure a favourable image after death: by nominating a trusted family member or otherwise discreet individual to compose an exemplary biography; by destroying correspondence and weeding papers; by self-consciously unburdening themselves to select intimates; by encouraging societies dedicated to their memory; and by keeping a diary or issuing autobiographical reflections. Writers who endeavoured to take such precautions, with incomplete success, include Robert Louis Stevenson, D. G. Rossetti, George Eliot, Henry James, the Brownings, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Tennyson. The difficulties encountered by guardians of writers' reputations are illuminated by reference to Edmund Gosse, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sidney Colvin, J.G. Lockhart, Mrs Gaskell, J. A. Froude, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
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.
David Bebbington
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199267651
- eISBN:
- 9780191708220
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199267651.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Gladstone was respected in his own day as a scholar. Deeply swayed by Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler and a host of other writers, Gladstone can now be studied in his intellectual development ...
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Gladstone was respected in his own day as a scholar. Deeply swayed by Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler and a host of other writers, Gladstone can now be studied in his intellectual development because of the availability of his published diaries, which, together with his annotated book collection, his private manuscripts, his correspondence, and his published works provide an unparalleled body of source material. His literary and other cultural interests were moulded by fundamental values in the fields of political theory, theology, and classical studies.Less
Gladstone was respected in his own day as a scholar. Deeply swayed by Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Butler and a host of other writers, Gladstone can now be studied in his intellectual development because of the availability of his published diaries, which, together with his annotated book collection, his private manuscripts, his correspondence, and his published works provide an unparalleled body of source material. His literary and other cultural interests were moulded by fundamental values in the fields of political theory, theology, and classical studies.
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.
Paul Betts
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199208845
- eISBN:
- 9780191594755
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208845.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Social History, Economic History
This chapter sets out to revise common understandings of the infamous Ministry of State Security and its role in East German society. In particular, this chapter aims to reread the Leviathan-like ...
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This chapter sets out to revise common understandings of the infamous Ministry of State Security and its role in East German society. In particular, this chapter aims to reread the Leviathan-like Stasi as an institution embedded in socialist society, rather than hovering above it. The first part of the chapter will address the historical emergence of the Stasi's secret surveillance empire and how it affected those under scrutiny. The second part looks at the Stasi's transformation in the 1970s, as it developed new duties, strategies and networks of informants to monitor the private lives of ever-more citizens. A central theme of this chapter is how the secret police's targeting of private lives as a haven of secrecy and danger created its own limits and backlashes. In effect the Stasi's secret machinery of power both undermined and in turn inadvertently fostered a sense of privacy among GDR citizens.Less
This chapter sets out to revise common understandings of the infamous Ministry of State Security and its role in East German society. In particular, this chapter aims to reread the Leviathan-like Stasi as an institution embedded in socialist society, rather than hovering above it. The first part of the chapter will address the historical emergence of the Stasi's secret surveillance empire and how it affected those under scrutiny. The second part looks at the Stasi's transformation in the 1970s, as it developed new duties, strategies and networks of informants to monitor the private lives of ever-more citizens. A central theme of this chapter is how the secret police's targeting of private lives as a haven of secrecy and danger created its own limits and backlashes. In effect the Stasi's secret machinery of power both undermined and in turn inadvertently fostered a sense of privacy among GDR citizens.
Eamon Duffy
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264751
- eISBN:
- 9780191734229
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264751.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Robert Clifford Latham never wrote a monograph of his own, and published fewer than a dozen scholarly articles. But his life-enhancing work as editor of the definitive edition of the most vivid and ...
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Robert Clifford Latham never wrote a monograph of his own, and published fewer than a dozen scholarly articles. But his life-enhancing work as editor of the definitive edition of the most vivid and revealing diary in the language will be remembered with affection and gratitude far beyond the world of learning, when the historical writings of most of his colleagues and contemporaries have been long forgotten. The six manuscript volumes of the diary of Samuel Pepys formed part of the magnificent library Pepys had bequeathed to his Alma Mater, Magdalene College Cambridge. Overlooked for more than a century, they were first published in a much abbreviated and bowdlerized form in 1825. Both the College and Bell and Sons, the publishers of the Diary, were acutely aware of the need for a new scholarly edition, but for the first half of the 20th century the project was dogged by amateurism and a marked absence of urgency on the part of those involved. Latham eventually undertook editorial oversight of the project as a whole. The success of the Pepys edition brought him many honours: the CBE in 1973, election to the British Academy in 1982, an honorary Fellowship of Magdalene in 1984, and of Royal Holloway in 1989.Less
Robert Clifford Latham never wrote a monograph of his own, and published fewer than a dozen scholarly articles. But his life-enhancing work as editor of the definitive edition of the most vivid and revealing diary in the language will be remembered with affection and gratitude far beyond the world of learning, when the historical writings of most of his colleagues and contemporaries have been long forgotten. The six manuscript volumes of the diary of Samuel Pepys formed part of the magnificent library Pepys had bequeathed to his Alma Mater, Magdalene College Cambridge. Overlooked for more than a century, they were first published in a much abbreviated and bowdlerized form in 1825. Both the College and Bell and Sons, the publishers of the Diary, were acutely aware of the need for a new scholarly edition, but for the first half of the 20th century the project was dogged by amateurism and a marked absence of urgency on the part of those involved. Latham eventually undertook editorial oversight of the project as a whole. The success of the Pepys edition brought him many honours: the CBE in 1973, election to the British Academy in 1982, an honorary Fellowship of Magdalene in 1984, and of Royal Holloway in 1989.
Niall Bolger, Gertraud Stadler, Christine Paprocki, and Anita DeLongis
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195377798
- eISBN:
- 9780199864522
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377798.003.0019
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology
In this chapter, the authors challenge the field to overcome its focus on internal states and behavioral precursors as a substitute for behavior, and offer instead a method for studying behavior in ...
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In this chapter, the authors challenge the field to overcome its focus on internal states and behavioral precursors as a substitute for behavior, and offer instead a method for studying behavior in everyday contexts. Using marital conflict as a specific instantiation of an important social behavior, the authors describe the utility of daily diaries as a tool for the assessment of these behaviors. They argue that studying variability in behavior is as essential to understanding behavior as studying mean levels, and offer possibilities for statistical analysis of diary data that focus on such variability. The authors report a reanalysis of couples’ diary data originally published in Bolger et al. (1989) that focuses on questions of variability in marital conflict and reactions to those conflicts. The authors describe how this analysis of variability led to insight about couple conflict that was not apparent from their original analyses.Less
In this chapter, the authors challenge the field to overcome its focus on internal states and behavioral precursors as a substitute for behavior, and offer instead a method for studying behavior in everyday contexts. Using marital conflict as a specific instantiation of an important social behavior, the authors describe the utility of daily diaries as a tool for the assessment of these behaviors. They argue that studying variability in behavior is as essential to understanding behavior as studying mean levels, and offer possibilities for statistical analysis of diary data that focus on such variability. The authors report a reanalysis of couples’ diary data originally published in Bolger et al. (1989) that focuses on questions of variability in marital conflict and reactions to those conflicts. The authors describe how this analysis of variability led to insight about couple conflict that was not apparent from their original analyses.
