British Autobiography in the 20th and 21st Centuries ed. by Sarah Herbe and Gabriele Linke (review)
- British Autobiography in the 20th and 21st Centuries ed. by Sarah Herbe and Gabriele Linke
About six years ago, during a day conference on biographies and autobiographies organized by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, one of the keynote speakers, a British professor of history, startled his non-British audience (and quite a few British participants as well, to be fair) by stating that auto/biography is a typical British genre, and that it is common knowledge that the European countries hardly, if at all, produce auto/biographies that are worth reading. This blatantly incorrect statement was made in pre-Brexit times, which makes it all the more remarkable. Or maybe not, as it could be considered—if one would want to do so—symptomatic of the growing insularity and anti-European sentiments that led to the decision of the British government to sever all ties with the European Union.
Luckily, the editors and authors of British Autobiography in the 20th and 21st Centuries, volume 87 in the series Anglistiek und Englischunterricht (Anglistics and ELF), edited by German scholars Gabriele Linke, Holger Rossow, and Merle Tönnes, and published by Universitätsverlag Winter in Heidelberg, take a profoundly different and refreshingly more complex stand on British autobiography. First of all, while stating in their introduction to the volume that autobiographies are some of the best-selling books in Britain, editors Sarah Herbe and Gabriele Linke point out that monographs and "collections of critical perspectives on twentieth and twenty-first century British scholarship have been rare" (7), which incidentally may partly explain the stance of the aforementioned keynote speaker. Secondly, and more importantly, Herbe and Linke make it clear that British autobiography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has "by and large, followed international trends" (9). One of these trends is that British autobiographies, like autobiographies published in other countries, no longer only focus on the lives of famous people—e.g., politicians, artists, and authors—but also on less well-known people's lives. The latter are represented in at least four of the eight essays that cover a broad range of contemporary autobiographical topics. In "Acknowledging Anger, Problematising Shame: Affirming New Identities in British Women's Disability Autobiographies," Katrin Röder discusses the autobiographical narratives in Lois Keith's anthology Mustn't Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women (1994). Referring to several non-British studies on disability life writing, like those of North American scholars G. Thomas Couser, Michelle Fine, Adrienne Asch, and Susannah B. Mintz, [End Page 893] Röder shows how Musn't Grumble became significant for British disabled women in their fight against stigmatization, discrimination, and oppression, while offering them a chance to challenge stereotypes by telling alternative life stories.
In her penetrating contribution "Between Ethnography and Ecology: Autobiographical Narratives from Rural Scotland since the Second World War," Gabriele Linke explores a selection of surprisingly unromantic autobiographies written since 1945 by non-famous inhabitants of rural Scotland, such as crofters, electricians, and nurses. These narratives, Linke writes, can be described as "life narratives with ethnographic interest" (186), as they focus on social and cultural phenomena such as rituals, family and kinship relations, and relations between farmers and agricultural laborers. Another feature of these particular autobiographies is their critical approach to the changing Scottish landscape due to rising consumerism and new technologies. In his insightful and entertaining essay "I Support Therefore I Am" on British football autobiographies, Cyprian Piskurek points out that, along with biographies of sport stars, autobiographies of British football fans have become increasingly popular, blurring "the once elitist privilege of autobiography" (163). One model for most of these autobiographical fan texts is Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (1992), in which the author narrates his life as a young boy growing up in a predominantly feminine and fatherless household, finding an "overwhelming maleness" (169) in the football stadium. Piskurek cleverly connects Hornby's narrative with theories about the construction and/or reconstruction of gender...
