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Understanding Our Selves
Modern Western biography has become one of the most popular and most controversial forms of literature. Critics have attacked its tendency to rely on a strong narrative drive, its focus on a single person's life and its tendency to delve ever more deeply into that person's inner, private experience, though these tendencies seem to have only increased biography's popularity. To date, however, biography has been a rarely studied literary form. Little serious attention has been given to the light biographies can shed on philosophical problems, such as the intertwining of knowledge and power, or the ways in which we can understand lives, or terms like 'the self'. Should selves be seen as relatio...
Landscapes of the Soul
Do you believe in God? Nine out of ten Americans unhesitatingly answer yes. But for Douglas Porpora, the real questions begin where pollsters leave off. What, he asks, does religious belief actually mean in our lives? Does it shape our identities and our actions? Or, despite our professions of faith, are we morally adrift? Landscapes of the Soul paints a disturbing picture of American spiritual life. In his search for answers to his questions, Porpora interviewed clerks and executives, Jews, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and even followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He asked them about God, and about what they saw as their own place in the universe. What he found was a widespread...
Burdens of Proof
Autobiographical impostures, once they come to light, appear to us as outrageous, scandalous. They confuse lived and textual identity (the person in the world and the character in the text) and call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information. In the process, they tell us a lot about cultural norms and anxieties. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography examines a broad range of impostures in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and asks about each one: Why this particular imposture? Why here and now? Susanna Egan’s historical survey of texts from early Christendom to the nineteenth century provides an understanding of the author in r...
Intimate Ephemera
Intimate Ephemera is the first major study of autobiographical writing produced and consumed in a youth subculture. Investigating the uses of the zine form for life writing, it examines the recurrent themes in texts circulating in Australian zine culture, including depression, consumerism, popular culture and political identity. Intimate Ephemera also examines zine culture as a unique community of life writing and reading, where handmade texts circulate in an economy of gifting and exchange utilising the postal system. The book analyses the material diversity of zines as handmade objects, examining the use of the photocopier and craft techniques in these limited edition publications, bringing a focus to the role of the text-object in communicating personal experience.
Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell
This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four ser...
The Biographical Turn
The Biographical Turn showcases the latest research through which the field of biography is being explored. Fifteen leading scholars in the field present the biographical perspective as a scholarly research methodology, investigating the consequences of this bottom-up approach and illuminating its value for different disciplines. While biography has been on the rise in academia since the 1980s, this volume highlights the theoretical implications of the biographical turn that is changing the humanities. Chapters cover subjects such as gender, religion, race, new media and microhistory, presenting biography as as a research methodology suited not only for historians but also for explorations i...
Katherine Mansfield
This book assesses the reason why Katherine Mansfield's reputation in France has always been greater than in England. It examines the ways in which the French reception of Mansfield has idealised her persona to the extent of crafting a hagiography. Mansfield is placed within the general literary context of her era, exploring French literary tendencies at the time and juxtaposing them with the main literary trends in England. The author determines the motives behind the French critics' desire to put Mansfield on a pedestal, discusses how the three years she spent on French soil influenced her writing and whether the translations of her work collude in the myth surrounding her personality. Thi...
Re-reading Pío Baroja and English Literature
This volume investigates a broad range of structural connections between PThis volume investigates a broad range of structural connections between Pío Baroja's early fiction and the novels of his contemporaries in England and Ireland, with prominence given to Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster and James Joyce. Starting from the premise that Spain has been neglected in studies which assess the evolution of the European novel at the turn of the twentieth century, and challenging the insular concept of the 'Generation of 1898', the author reassesses the relationship between Baroja and English literature. Particular emphasis is given to renderings of consciousness, the role and identity of the artist, European landscapes, and questions of form, genre and representation in the novels under scrutiny. The book produces new readings of Baroja in the context of early twentieth-century English fiction.
Leonardo Sciascia's French Authors
Sciascia frequently alludes to French authors, and is often taken to have a close relationship with French literature in general. However, academic critics have never given this important relationship comprehensive and detailed examination. This book focuses on the most relevant French writers. For the majority, attention falls on two complementary areas: the opinions that Sciascia expresses about the writer in his essays; and intertextual allusions to the writer in Sciascia's fiction. These allusions often shift the meaning of the host text or markedly increase its impact. This book works on the assumption that, in order to analyse these effects fully, a careful reading of the relevant French texts is needed. This exploration leads to a reappraisal of Sciascia's relations both with particular French authors and also with French literature generally.
The Self in Moral Space
All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker examines a range of classic and contemporary autobiographies—including those of St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Roland Barthes, Seamus Heaney, and J. M. Coetzee—to reveal a whole domain of life narrative that has been previously ignored, one that enables a new approach to the question of what constitutes a "good" life narrative. Moving from an ethics toward an aesthetics of life writing, Parker follows Wittge...
