American Autobiography

American Autobiography PDF Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299127848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive assessment of the major periods and varieties of American autobiography. The eleven original essays in this volume do not only survey what has been done; they also point toward what can and should be done in future studies of a literary genre that is now receiving major scholarly attention. Book jacket.

American Autobiography

American Autobiography PDF Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299127848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive assessment of the major periods and varieties of American autobiography. The eleven original essays in this volume do not only survey what has been done; they also point toward what can and should be done in future studies of a literary genre that is now receiving major scholarly attention. Book jacket.

American Autobiography

American Autobiography PDF Author: Rachael McLennan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748644628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first student guide to American autobiographys introduction to the major forms of autobiographical writing in America and important current developments in autobiography studies discusses both 'canonised' texts and those from contemporary writers. Taking a broadly chronological approach, the history of American autobiography is explored including the social and cultural factors that might account for the importance of autobiography in American culture. Then post-1970 autobiographies are examined, taking into account the development in poststructuralism from this time that affected notions of the subject who could write, and conceptions of truth, identity and reference.

Native American Autobiography

Native American Autobiography PDF Author: Arnold Krupat
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299140243
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

Get Book Here

Book Description
Publisher description: Native American Autobiography is the first collection to bring together the major autobiographical narratives by Native American people from the earliest documents that exist to the present._ The thirty narratives included here cover a range of tribes and cultural areas, over a span of more than 200 years. From the earliest known written memoir--a 1768 narrative by the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan, reproduced as a chapter here--to recent reminiscences by such prominent writers as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, the book covers a broad range of Native American experience. Editor Arnold Krupat provides a general introduction, a historical introduction to each of the seven sections, extensive headnotes for each selection, and suggestions for further reading, making this an ideal resource for courses in American literature, history, anthropology, and Native American studies. General readers, too, will find a wealth of fascinating material in the life stories of these Native American men and women.

Mediating American Autobiography

Mediating American Autobiography PDF Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America's preeminent authors began to think about photography's implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing. Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman-were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers' reflections on photography-in Emerson's Representative Men, Thoreau's journals, Douglass's narratives of slavery, and Whitman's Specimen Days-with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America. As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan's work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.

Native American Autobiography Redefined

Native American Autobiography Redefined PDF Author: Stephanie A. Sellers
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820479446
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
Textbook

Reading African American Autobiography

Reading African American Autobiography PDF Author: Eric D. Lamore
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299309800
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the 1760s to Barack Obama, this collection offers fresh looks at classic African American life narratives; highlights neglected African American lives, texts, and genres; and discusses the diverse outpouring of twenty-first-century memoirs.

Irish-American Autobiography

Irish-American Autobiography PDF Author: James Silas Rogers
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press + ORM
ISBN: 0813229197
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
This lively survey of the ever-changing Irish-American experience contains “many perceptive, and sometimes surprising, observations” (The Irish Times). Irish-American Autobiography explores the evolution of Irishness in America through memoirs that describe, define, and redefine what it means to be Irish. From athletes and entertainers to saloon keepers, community activists, and Catholic priests, Irish-Americans of all stripes share their thoughts and perceptions on their ever-evolving ethnic identity. Poet and Irish studies specialist James Silas Rogers begins his evocative analysis with celebrity memoirs by athletes like boxer John L. Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mack―written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them. Later, he traces the many tensions registered by lesser-known Irish-Americans who’ve told their life stories. South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, framing their identity as outsiders looking in. Even the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners speaks to the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Rogers also examines the changing role of Catholicism as a cultural touchstone for Irish Americans, and examines the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connection—documenting an “ethnic fade” that never quite happened.

A History of African American Autobiography

A History of African American Autobiography PDF Author: Joycelyn Moody
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744

Get Book Here

Book Description
This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

Studies in Modern American Autobiography

Studies in Modern American Autobiography PDF Author: Gordon O. Taylor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349090468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Get Book Here

Book Description


Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-century American Autobiography

Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-century American Autobiography PDF Author: Susan Clair Imbarrato
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330122
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this ambitious work, Susan Clair Imbarrato examines the changes in the American autobiographical voice as it speaks through the transition from a colonial society to an independent republic.Imbarrato charts the development of early American autobiography from the self-examination mode of the Puritan journal and diary to the self-inventive modes of eighteenth-century writings, which in turn anticipate the more romantic voices of nineteenth-century American literature. She focuses especially on the ways in which first-person narrative displayed an ever-stronger awareness of its own subjectivity. The eighteenth century, she notes, remained closer in temper to its Puritan communal foundations than to its Romantic progeny, but there emerged, nevertheless, a sense of the individual voice that anticipated the democratic celebration of the self. Through acts of self-examination, this study shows, self-construction became possible.In tracing this development, the author focuses on six writers in three literary genres. She begins with the spiritual autobiographies of Jonathan Edwards and Elizabeth Ashbridge and then considers the travel narratives of Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth House Trist. She concludes with an examination of political autobiography as exemplified in the writings of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. These authors, Imbarrato finds, were invigorated by their choices in a social-political climate that revered the individual in proper relationship to the republic. Their writings expressed a revolutionary spirit that was neither cynical nor despairing but one that evinced a shared conviction about the bond between self and community.