- Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2009–2010
A self develops, becomes integrated, and recognizable to the degree that one becomes aware that she/he consistently experiences and interacts with-in the world in her or his particular ways.
—Milton Dawes
Trying to identify oneself definitively by teasing apart all of the deeply intertwined relations between self and other—to fix one’s true self—may be in vain, because one’s self changes through experience and one need only be in touch with one’s present state.
—Roxanne J. Fand
Phyllis E. Wachter, compiler of Biography ’s annual bibliography for over twenty years, continues to teach and conduct life writing research.
Books
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Explores the lifestyle and experiences of the female office worker from her first, marginal appearance in the 1870s to her troubled but firm establishment by 1900.
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Shows how collective memorializing of the witch trials represented real or imagined threats to American society from the Revolution through the 1800s.
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Prosopography of the Thackeray family uses letters, journals, notebooks, and diaries to focus on Thackeray’s relations with his mother, wife, and daughters.
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Contextualized oral histories, organized chronologically around broad themes in US history, show how oral histories link individual experiences to larger historical narratives. [End Page 714]
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Shows how nineteenth-century biographers challenged the “Great Men” biographical tradition to include the lives of neglected or unknown men and women.
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Tracks the conflicts over the meaning and legacy of Du Bois’s life.
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Analyzes how segments of Israeli society constructed nationalist narratives around Jewish volunteers from Palestine who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
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Paired readings of works by Helena Parente Cunha and Luisa Futoransky, Ana Maria Shua and Nélida Piñon, and Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling reveal genres of resistance.
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Explores how photographs helped Freud elaborate the concepts of psychoanalysis.
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Highlights variations on themes of love and loss related to the death of a spouse.
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Recreates from interviews the life stories of thirty-seven early twentieth century Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg.
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Chronicles developments in Shakespeare biographies from the early 1700s to the present.
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Examines the uses of oral language for liberation and generational transmission in Italian American oral biographies, memoirs, fiction, and poetry.
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Places the nineteenth-century African American and Native American...