- Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2010–2011
Writing about one’s actual self with honesty is usually difficult and terrifying.
—Soyini Ayanna Forde
There are many different ways to say “I.”
—Natalie Edwards, Shifting Subjects
What is it like to be another person, to enjoy or endure the experiences of one of our more interesting contemporaries or an intriguing figure from the past?
—Richard Rathbone
Books
Unpacks historical, cultural, rhetorical, and personal implications of the closet.
Focuses on the depiction of celibate marriage in lives of three couples who became saints.
Situates Kahn’s photo-cinematographic experiment in preserving world memory in biographical, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. [End Page 676]
Second edition includes developments in autobiographical criticism and a new chapter on narrative, and highlights different forms of the genre as well as recent trends like blogs.
Highlights the historiographical potential in alternate histories presented in experimental films, fake documentaries, home movies and found footage, video games, and digital media.
Traces the changing representations by writers, activists, artists, historians, and local residents of the 1918 lynching of an eight-months pregnant woman in Georgia.
Addresses the strategies by which proper names served as points of negotiation between individual identities and social order in the Renaissance.
Uses a rare cache of letters between a former slave owner and her escaped slave to examine race relations in mid-nineteenth century urban settings.
Reads Fors Clavigera as simultaneously an experiment in education and a treatise on education, with consequences for ongoing pedagogical debates.
Argues for the extensive use of writing by ordinary people in the period between Alexander and the Arab conquests.
New readings of Robert Browning based on recent work in speech pragmatics and visual thinking suggest how developments in cognitive science impact biographical practices.
Uses newly discovered primary sources to place Cromwell’s biography in the contexts of the national mood of 1640 and changes in Cromwellian historiography.
Shows how Reagan’s rhetorical presentations became accepted collective memory. [End Page 677]
Contends that the figure of the author “served as a catalyst to a sense of shared cultural identity in both the Greek and Chinese worlds.”
Explores Elizabeth’s self-representations, especially in speeches, conversations, and poems.
Narratives of pilgrims to Muslim saint shrines complicate discourses of religious and communal identity in northwestern India.
Links the “new imperialism” and “new journalism” of 1870–1914 in changing Stanley, Gordon, de Brazza, Marchand...