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Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2006
- pp. 446-461
- 10.1353/bio.2006.0063
- Article
- Additional Information
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Certain aspects of historical reality can best be captured by literary autobiographies. Historical reality is inherently perspectival. Autobiography effectively describes the universe as it appeared from different acknowledged perspectives, enabling historians to rethink and refeel past experiences. Literary techniques such as irony and metaphor make autobiography a particularly evocative historical source material.