The Oxford History of Life-Writing

The Oxford History of Life-Writing PDF Author: Patrick Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019266896X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
With the growing urgency of questions about how to claim identity and achieve authenticity, life-writing started to acquire an unprecedented cultural importance. A range of social and economic developments, from the publishing boom in memoir writing to the rise of the internet, transformed the possibilities for self-expression. By the end of the timespan covered in this book life-writing was no longer something done mainly by important individuals who wrote their autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary. It became a truly ubiquitous phenomenon, part and parcel of the everyday formation of selfhood. Considering a diverse range of texts from across the English-speaking world, this volume places life-writing in relation to wider debates about the sociology and philosophy of modern identity, and the changing marketplace of publishing and bookselling. Yet in doing so it seeks above all to credit the extraordinary literary inventiveness which the pursuit of self-knowledge inspired in this period. Major subjects addressed include: the aftermath of World War II, including responses to the Holocaust; the impact of psychoanalysis on biography; autofiction, autrebiography, and changing ideas about authentic self-knowledge; coming out memoirs and the transformation of sexual identity; feminist exemplary writing and lyric poetry; multilingualism and intercultural life-writing; the memoir boom and the decline of intimacy; testimony narrative and memory culture; posthumanism in theory and practice; literary biography as an alternative to literary theory; literary celebrity and its consequences for literature; social media and digital life-writing.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing

The Oxford History of Life-Writing PDF Author: Patrick Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019266896X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the growing urgency of questions about how to claim identity and achieve authenticity, life-writing started to acquire an unprecedented cultural importance. A range of social and economic developments, from the publishing boom in memoir writing to the rise of the internet, transformed the possibilities for self-expression. By the end of the timespan covered in this book life-writing was no longer something done mainly by important individuals who wrote their autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary. It became a truly ubiquitous phenomenon, part and parcel of the everyday formation of selfhood. Considering a diverse range of texts from across the English-speaking world, this volume places life-writing in relation to wider debates about the sociology and philosophy of modern identity, and the changing marketplace of publishing and bookselling. Yet in doing so it seeks above all to credit the extraordinary literary inventiveness which the pursuit of self-knowledge inspired in this period. Major subjects addressed include: the aftermath of World War II, including responses to the Holocaust; the impact of psychoanalysis on biography; autofiction, autrebiography, and changing ideas about authentic self-knowledge; coming out memoirs and the transformation of sexual identity; feminist exemplary writing and lyric poetry; multilingualism and intercultural life-writing; the memoir boom and the decline of intimacy; testimony narrative and memory culture; posthumanism in theory and practice; literary biography as an alternative to literary theory; literary celebrity and its consequences for literature; social media and digital life-writing.

The Oxford History of Life-writing

The Oxford History of Life-writing PDF Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199684073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.

Life-Writing

Life-Writing PDF Author: Donald J. Winslow
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824817138
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
This text presents an introduction and a reference source of terms in the writing of biographies, autobiographies and related literature.

Life-writing in the History of Archaeology

Life-writing in the History of Archaeology PDF Author: Gabriel Moshenska
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800084501
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Life-writing is a vital part of the history of archaeology, and a growing field of scholarship within the discipline. The lives of archaeologists are entangled with histories of museums and collections, developments in science and scholarship, and narratives of nationalism and colonialism into the present. In recent years life-writing has played an important role in the surge of new research in the history of archaeology, including ground-breaking studies of discipline formation, institutionalisation, and social and intellectual networks. Sources such as diaries, wills, film, and the growing body of digital records are powerful tools for highlighting the contributions of hitherto marginalised archaeological lives including many pioneering women, hired labourers and other ‘hidden hands’. This book brings together critical perspectives on life-writing in the history of archaeology from leading figures in the field. These include studies of archive formation and use, the concept of ‘dig-writing’ as a distinctive genre of archaeological creativity, and reviews of new sources for already well-known lives. Several chapters reflect on the experience of life-writing, review the historiography of the field, and assess the intellectual value and significance of life-writing as a genre. Together, they work to problematise underlying assumptions about this genre, foregrounding methodology, social theory, ethics and other practice-focused frameworks in conscious tension with previous practices.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern PDF Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages PDF Author: Karen A. Winstead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191016934
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, writers from Bede to Chaucer were thinking about life and experimenting with ways to translate lives, their own and others', into literature. Their subjects included career religious, saints, celebrities, visionaries, pilgrims, princes, philosophers, poets, and even a few 'ordinary people.' They relay life stories not only in chronological narratives, but also in debates, dialogues, visions, and letters. Many medieval biographers relied on the reader's trust in their authority, but some espoused standards of evidence that seem distinctly modern, drawing on reliable written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, and cross-checking their facts wherever possible. Others still professed allegiance to evidence but nonetheless freely embellished and invented not only events and dialogue but the sources to support them. The first book devoted to life-writing in medieval England, The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages covers major life stories in Old and Middle English, Latin, and French, along with such Continental classics as the letters of Abelard and Heloise and the autobiographical Vision of Christine de Pizan. In addition to the life stories of historical figures, it treats accounts of fictional heroes, from Beowulf to King Arthur to Queen Katherine of Alexandria, which show medieval authors experimenting with, adapting, and expanding the conventions of life writing. Though Medieval life writings can be challenging to read, we encounter in them the antecedents of many of our own diverse biographical forms-tabloid lives, literary lives, brief lives, revisionist lives; lives of political figures, memoirs, fictional lives, and psychologically-oriented accounts that register the inner lives of their subjects.

Encyclopedia of Life Writing

Encyclopedia of Life Writing PDF Author: Margaretta Jolly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136787445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1141

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Book Description
First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Who Wrote the Book of Life?

Who Wrote the Book of Life? PDF Author: Lily E. Kay
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734172
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States. Kay draws out the historical specificity in the process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technology—and consequently as a “book of life.” This molecular writing and reading is part of the cultural production of the Nuclear Age, its power amplified by the centuries-old theistic resonance of the “book of life” metaphor. Yet, as the author points out, these are just metaphors: analogies, not ontologies. Necessary and productive as they have been, they have their epistemological limitations. Deploying analyses of language, cryptology, and information theory, the author persuasively argues that, technically speaking, the genetic code is not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system (objections voiced by experts as early as the 1950s). Thus her historical reconstruction and analyses also serve as a critique of the new genomic biopower. Genomic textuality has become a fact of life, a metaphor literalized, she claims, as human genome projects promise new levels of control over life through the meta-level of information: control of the word (the DNA sequences) and its editing and rewriting. But the author shows how the humbling limits of these scriptural metaphors also pose a challenge to the textual and material mastery of the genomic “book of life.”

Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing

Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing PDF Author: Helena Grice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136604855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian/American history. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have recently become the subject of intense American cultural scrutiny, namely China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean American war and its legacy; the era of Japanese geisha culture and its subsequent decline; and China’s one-child policy and the rise of transracial, international adoption in its wake. Grice examines and accounts for this cultural and literary preoccupation, exploring the corresponding historical-political situations that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America.

About Method

About Method PDF Author: Jutta Schickore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675989X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Scientists’ views on what makes an experiment successful have developed dramatically throughout history. Different criteria for proper experimentation were privileged at different times, entirely new criteria for securing experimental results emerged, and the meaning of commitment to experimentation altered. In About Method, Schickore captures this complex trajectory of change from 1660 to the twentieth century through the history of snake venom research. As experiments with poisonous snakes and venom were both challenging and controversial, the experimenters produced very detailed accounts of their investigations, which go back three hundred years—making venom research uniquely suited for such a long-term study. By analyzing key episodes in the transformation of venom research, Schickore is able to draw out the factors that have shaped methods discourse in science. About Method shows that methodological advancement throughout history has not been simply a steady progression toward better, more sophisticated and improved methodologies of experimentation. Rather, it was a progression in awareness of the obstacles and limitations that scientists face in developing strategies to probe the myriad unknown complexities of nature. The first long-term history of this development and of snake venom research, About Method offers a major contribution to integrated history and philosophy of science.