Description
Oxford On LifeWriting 2018 Edition by Zachary Leader
'Life-writing' is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets,Facebook entries). On Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to something of the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of 'life,' 'self' and 'story' which help to explain these changing fortunesand features, recent attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, life-writing and psychoanalysis, life-writing and philosophy. The essays mostly focus on individual instances rather than fields, whether historical, theoretical or generic. Generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the'life-changing encounter,' a frequent trope in literary life-writing, is pondered by Hermione Lee through an account of a much-storied first meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the 'cradle to grave' life-narrative, as well asthe potential distortions it breeds, by focusing on Shakespeare biography, in particular attempts to explain Shakespeare's so-called 'lost years'. Table of Contents :- Zachary Leader: Introduction1: James Shapiro: Unravelling Shakespeare's Life2: Michael Dobson: A Boy from Stratford, 1769-1916: Shakespearean Biography and Romantic Nationalism3: William St. Clair: Romantic Biography: Conveying Personality, Intimacy, and Authenticity in an Age of Ink and Paper4: Alison Booth: Prosopography and Crowded Attention in Old and New Media5: Adam Foulds: Writing Real People6: Janis Freedman Bellow: Rosamund and Ravelstein: The Discandying of a Creator's Confection7: Hermione Lee: 'From Memory': Literary Encounters and Life-Writing8: Karen A. Winstead: Medieval Life-Writing and the Strange Case of Margery Kempe Of Lynn (c.1373-c.1440)9: Alan Stewart: The Materiality of Early Modern Life-Writing: The Case of Richard Stonley10: Joyce E. Chaplin: The Autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin11: Blake Morrison: The Worst Thing I Ever Did: The Contemporary Confessional Memoir12: J. David Velleman: The Rights to a Life13: Patrick Hayes: Human 2.0? Life-Writing In the Digital Age14: Laura Marcus: Autobiography and Psychoanalysis15: Galen Strawson: The Unstoried Life Index