Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-Language Contexts
Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-Language Contexts
Author(s): Stephen Hardy, Martina Horáková, Michael Matthew Kaylor, Kateřina Prajznerová
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Biography; biographical writing; life writing; autobiography; English language; pastoral biography;
Summary/Abstract: Alternatives in Biography focuses on texts that draw into question fictional, personal, and academic genre conventions, foregrounding the multiple ways lives are written and selves are constructed. Each of the four chapters examines a particular type of transgressive auto/biographical writing, namely versions of Uranian/fictionate autobiography, bioregional biography, pastoral biography, and Indigenous collaborative life writing. American, Australian, British, Canadian, and Northern Irish perspectives are explored. Key writers are A. Newman (1854–1932), Forrest Reid (1875–1947), Emily Carr (1871–1945), Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919), John Berger (1926–), Peter Ackroyd (1949–), Paul Carter (1951–), Rita (1921–1996) and Jackie Huggins (1956–), and Kim Scott (1957–) and Hazel Brown (1925–).
- E-ISBN-13: 978-80-210-7637-2
- Print-ISBN-13: 978-80-210-5757-9
- Page Count: 312
- Publication Year: 2011
- Language: English
Versions of Pastoral Biography: Ackroyd, Carter, Berger
Versions of Pastoral Biography: Ackroyd, Carter, Berger
(Versions of Pastoral Biography: Ackroyd, Carter, Berger)
- Author(s):Stephen Hardy
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Philology, Theory of Literature, British Literature
- Page Range:3-90
- No. of Pages:88
- Keywords:Pastoral biography; English writers; Peter Ackroyd; Paul Carter; John Berger; literature genre;
- Summary/Abstract:BIOGRAPHY and pastoral both constitute broad generic categorizations which are open to a constantly changing and developing variety of interpretations with regard to their precise nature and boundaries. This chapter primarily concerns itself with an analysis of parts of the work of three English-born writers, Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949), Paul Carter (b. 1951) and John Berger (b. 1926), and ways in which they provide instances of combining elements of biography and pastoral, while also challenging what might be considered as the boundaries of their conventional characterization. The commentary and analysis provided here are intended as initially suggestive rather than potentially definitive and do not therefore incorporate any theoretical overview of either genre. The prefatory remarks on biography and pastoral are provided as a form of contextualization which is intended to be of immediate relevance to what follows. No previous acquaintance is presumed on the part of the reader with the three writers in question. A short introductory sketch of the nature of their work will therefore be in order before embarking upon a more detailed exploration of those aspects relevant to the brief series of partly explicative and partly interpretive commentaries presented here.
- Price: 9.00 €
Indigenous Collaborative Life Writing: Narrative Transgression in Auntie Rita and Kayang & Me
Indigenous Collaborative Life Writing: Narrative Transgression in Auntie Rita and Kayang & Me
(Indigenous Collaborative Life Writing: Narrative Transgression in Auntie Rita and Kayang & Me)
- Author(s):Martina Horáková
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Studies of Literature, Oral history, Social history, Theory of Literature
- Page Range:93-138
- No. of Pages:46
- Keywords:indigenous collaborative life writing; narrative transgression; genre; Auntie Rita; biography; Australian literature;
- Summary/Abstract:In Kim Scott’s novel Benang: From the Heart (1999), the narrator Harley—“the first white man born” and a product of his white grandfather’s personal eugenicist project—attempts to write down, in a subversive and rebellious gesture, “the most local of histories,” in order to articulate alternative perspectives on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity and belonging. In this “counter-project,” Harley must not only trace his Indigenous family lineage and their stories, but he must also learn to listen to and negotiate these stories. Gradually his endeavour comes to be characterized by what Lisa Slater, in her critical essay on Benang, calls “an ethics of uncertainty,” pointing to Harley’s, and by extension to Scott’s, preoccupation with cultural dislocation—a sense of not belonging fully to either culture—and the ways this can be reflected in his writing style, language, genre and frame. Harley, the indeterminate and uncertain narrator in Slater’s terms, can be read, I would suggest, as an archetypal Indigenous life chronicler, an embodiment of the position occupied by many contemporary Australian Indigenous storytellers/writers who use the genre of life writing to re-create their stolen identities while exposing and “writing back” to the (post)colonial narratives of the settler nation.
- Price: 7.00 €
Uranian Autobiography: Newman’s Rondeaux of Boyhood and Reid’s Apostate
Uranian Autobiography: Newman’s Rondeaux of Boyhood and Reid’s Apostate
(Uranian Autobiography: Newman’s Rondeaux of Boyhood and Reid’s Apostate)
- Author(s):Michael Matthew Kaylor
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theory of Literature, British Literature
- Page Range:141-230
- No. of Pages:90
- Keywords:Biography; autobiographical writing; Uranian autobiography; English literature; Uranian writers;
- Summary/Abstract:The core concern of all autobiographical writing is the elucidation of the following diptych: Who I am and Who I have been. A plethora of issues arise from this, involving credibility, authenticity, available evidence, point of view, authorial intention, gaps in memory, social standing, interpersonal relationships, sexuality, to name but a few. These issues are problematized even further when a writer cannot, for whatever reason, safely admit either Who I am or Who I have been. Such was the case for the pederastic writers and artists of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, a cluster of diverse voices that have been decently subsumed under the title “Uranian.” Having illustrated at some length in my Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006) and in the introduction to my Lad’s Love: An Anthology of Uranian Poetry and Prose (2010) that, for the Uranian writers and artists, Lord Alfred Douglas’s (in)famous phrase “the Love that dare not speak its name” was largely a social and cultural reality, I will not, at present, belabour the point.
- Price: 9.00 €
Bioregional Biography: The Landscapes of the Lives of Emily Carr and Emma Bell Miles
Bioregional Biography: The Landscapes of the Lives of Emily Carr and Emma Bell Miles
(Bioregional Biography: The Landscapes of the Lives of Emily Carr and Emma Bell Miles)
- Author(s):Kateřina Prajznerová
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Recent History (1900 till today), 19th Century, Theory of Literature, American Literature
- Page Range:233-300
- No. of Pages:68
- Keywords:Biography; bioregional biography; place-based essays; literary history; literary map; genre of biography;
- Summary/Abstract:AS authors of place-based, personal essays, Emily Carr (1871-1945) and Emma Bell Miles (1879-1919) were pioneering cartographers: pioneering in the sense that they were breaking new ground, in terms of the literary history of their respective places as well in terms of the genre of biography; cartographers in the sense that each devoted her life to writing about a place she knew, about herself, creating a body of work that offers a map for others, native-born or not, to find their own way. This chapter examines the interplay of place, self, and narrative in Carr’s portrait of Victoria, British Columbia, and Miles’s portrait of Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, around the turn of the twentieth century. My aim is twofold: to illustrate, on the example of particular sites, each author’s individual artistic imbrication in the landscape that was her home, an imbrication that resulted in a lasting addition to the literary map of North America; simultaneously, by gleaning references to these particular sites from multiple volumes of their personal nonfiction and pairing the two life-lines into a cross-continental conversation, to show that Carr and Miles relate to place in strikingly similar ways—when their journal entries and essays are surveyed and over-laid, bioregional biography takes shape.
- Price: 8.00 €
