Autobiographical Writing And British Literature 1783 1834

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Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783-1834

Author : James Treadwell
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191532363
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783-1834 by : James Treadwell

Download or read book Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783-1834 written by James Treadwell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word 'autobiography' is a late eighteenth-century coinage; yet by 1826 it was used as the title for a multi-volume anthology of self-writing, and in 1834 Thomas Carlyle wrote of 'these Autobiographical times of ours'. Over the course of those few decades, readers and writers came to recognize and name a new genre. This book is the first full study of the phenomenon, examining both the conditions and the practice of autobiographical writing in Romantic literature. Historians of autobiography have often pointed to the turn of the nineteenth century as a pivotal moment. In Rousseau and De Quincey's 'Confessions', Wordsworth's 'Prelude', and other canonical documents, it has been argued, self-writing begins to serve the purpose of expressing the individuality, autonomy, and interiority of the self. A more wide-ranging view of the actual state of autobiography at the time exposes this narrative as a misrepresentation. Self-writing does gain a new kind of prominence around 1800; not, however, because it articulates 'Romantic' ideologies of selfhood, but because it becomes a focus of scrutiny, and of contention. The decades of the Romantic period identified themselves as 'Autobiographical times' — but did so anxiously. This book asks: what forms did that recognition and that anxiety take within the literary culture of the period? What did autobiography mean to Romantic readers and writers? How do autobiographical texts of the period reflect, express, and negotiate these conditions? As well as reading a wide variety of those documents, with single chapters devoted to works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, Treadwell examines writing on and around autobiography: essays, reviews, and other forms of commentary. By preserving a continuous relation between the texts and their contexts, this book offers the first proper study of what is actually meant by 'Romantic autobiography'.

The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835

Author : Neil Ramsey
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351885677
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 by : Neil Ramsey

Download or read book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 written by Neil Ramsey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

Romantic women's life writing

Author : Susan Civale
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526101289
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Romantic women's life writing by : Susan Civale

Download or read book Romantic women's life writing written by Susan Civale and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the publication of women’s life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays, four writers whose names were caught up in debates about the moral and literary respectability of publishing the ‘private’. Focusing on gender, genre and authorship, this study examines key works of life writing by and about these women, and the reception of these texts. It argues for the importance of life writing—a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification—in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. The book ultimately constructs a fuller picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century and the role of women writers and their life writing within it.

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Author : Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110381486
Total Pages : 2220 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction by : Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Download or read book Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction written by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 2220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine

Author : Simon P Hull
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317315707
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine by : Simon P Hull

Download or read book Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine written by Simon P Hull and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine.

Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

Author : Heidi L. Pennington
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826274064
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography by : Heidi L. Pennington

Download or read book Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography written by Heidi L. Pennington and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

A History of British Working Class Literature

Author : John Goodridge
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108121306
Total Pages : 815 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (81 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of British Working Class Literature by : John Goodridge

Download or read book A History of British Working Class Literature written by John Goodridge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.

Early Modern English Lives

Author : Ronald Bedford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351942409
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Early Modern English Lives by : Ronald Bedford

Download or read book Early Modern English Lives written by Ronald Bedford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism

Author : David Duff
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191019704
Total Pages : 817 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism by : David Duff

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism written by David Duff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of the latest research on this topic. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of revolutionary turbulence and international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook covers key themes and concepts in Romantic studies as well as less chartered topics such as freedom of speech, literature and drugs, Romantic oratory, and literary uses of dialect. All the major male and female Romantic authors are included along with numerous lesser-known writers, the emphasis throughout being on the diversity of Romantic writing and the complexities and internal divisions of the culture that sustained it. The volume strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty to provide an accessible guide to current thinking and a conceptual reorganization of this fast-moving field.

Editing Women's Writing, 1670-1840

Author : Amy Culley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351586025
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis Editing Women's Writing, 1670-1840 by : Amy Culley

Download or read book Editing Women's Writing, 1670-1840 written by Amy Culley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume is the first to reflect on the theory and practice of editing women’s writing of the 18th century. The list of contributors includes experts on the fiction, drama, poetry, life-writing, diaries and correspondence of familiar and lesser known women, including Jane Austen, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood and Mary Robinson. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings not only of the woman writer and women’s literary history, but also of our own editorial practice.

War Stories

Author : Philip Dwyer
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1785333089
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis War Stories by : Philip Dwyer

Download or read book War Stories written by Philip Dwyer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre’s surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

Author : Juliet John
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191082090
Total Pages : 769 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture by : Juliet John

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.

Placing Charlotte Smith

Author : Jacqueline M. Labbe
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611462967
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis Placing Charlotte Smith by : Jacqueline M. Labbe

Download or read book Placing Charlotte Smith written by Jacqueline M. Labbe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and far-ranging interest in place, space, and situation characterizes the work of Romantic-era British author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Featuring ten original essays, an introduction and an epilogue, this volume offers new insights into Smith’s life and work by exploring two central issues: Smith’s place as a foundational writer in her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a concept of social and literary importance. The contributors analyze themes such as itineracy, the natural world, and patriotism; they also explore the position of Smith’s work and authorial identity in terms of genre, aesthetics, and market dynamics. With its innovative approach to place as a material location, symbolic principle, and literary device, this volume advances our understanding of Smith’s work. Placing Charlotte Smith reveals Smith as an author who not only energizes our interest in domestic concerns, but who also shapes a global discourse constituted by changing ideas about borders, travel, national, and international identities.

Who Was William Hickey?

Author : James R. Farr
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000649881
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Was William Hickey? by : James R. Farr

Download or read book Who Was William Hickey? written by James R. Farr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes an example of life-writing, an autobiography that was written in the early nineteenth century and will appeal to readers of many disciplines who are interested in understanding the interconnectedness of memory, textual narrative, and ideas of selfhood. Moreover, this book reasserts the importance of the individual in history. It explains how personal narratives reveal the individual as a purposeful social actor pursuing particular objectives, but framed by cultural and social contexts, in this case by eighteenth-century London and Imperial India. The author of this autobiography, William Hickey, projects a sense of self formed by a combination of an interiorized self-consciousness (an awareness of himself as an autonomous individual, although not one prone to deep self-reflection) and a socially-turned self-fashioning. Like so many autobiographers of his time, Hickey’s self is realized through the production of a narrative, his self fixed and defined through the act of writing. As he wrote his memoirs, Hickey was engaged in purposeful textual representation to satisfy his perceived sense of place in that culture (above all, as a gentleman) while tacitly reflecting the constraints of that culture imposed upon the form and content of the text.

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

Author : Carl Thompson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134105142
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (341 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing by : Carl Thompson

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing written by Carl Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences. An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing examines: Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world. Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study. Contributors: Simon Bainbridge, Anthony Bale, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Dúnlaith Bird, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Wendy Bracewell, Kylie Cardell, Daniel Carey, Janice Cavell, Simon Cooke, Matthew Day, Kate Douglas, Justin D. Edwards, David Farley, Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, Laura E. Franey, Rune Graulund, Justine Greenwood, James M. Hargett, Jennifer Hayward, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Graham Huggan, William Hutton, Robin Jarvis, Tabish Khair, Zoë Kinsley, Barbara Korte, Julia Kuehn, Scott Laderman, Claire Lindsay, Churnjeet Mahn, Nabil Matar, Steve Mentz, Laura Nenzi, Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Manfred Pfister, Susan L. Roberson, Paul Smethurst, Carl Thompson, C.W. Thompson, Margaret Topping, Richard White, Gregory Woods.

Contemporary Perspectives in English Language Studies: Linguistics and Literature (Penerbit USM)

Author : Sarjit Kaur
Publisher : Penerbit USM
ISBN 13 : 9838617032
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (386 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary Perspectives in English Language Studies: Linguistics and Literature (Penerbit USM) by : Sarjit Kaur

Download or read book Contemporary Perspectives in English Language Studies: Linguistics and Literature (Penerbit USM) written by Sarjit Kaur and published by Penerbit USM. This book was released on 2014-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussing contemporary perspectives and new developments in the field of English language studies has gained ascendancy in view of the fact that such concerns about learning and teaching English make important contributions to society. Such discussions are of critical importance in today’s globalised societies and more needs to be done towards collaboratively presenting the growing wealth of quality research in linguistics and literature. Linguists and scholars continue to champion the need to interrogate the discourse of literary and language texts using a number of critical frameworks that help sensitise readers to the ideological nature of literary discourse and the ways in which certain dominant ideas of nation, race, ethnicity and gender are ratified or challenged. Readers need to be constantly challenged to think, interpret and evaluate differing views and perspectives. The collection of chapters in this book explores contemporary issues and perspectives in linguistics and literature among educators and researchers whose primary focus is to examine the manner in which English is used for various educational purposes from traditional curriculum demands to answering broader questions about human knowledge, global citizenship and social engagement.

Good Lives

Author : Samuel Clark
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192634720
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Good Lives by : Samuel Clark

Download or read book Good Lives written by Samuel Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reasoning with autobiography is a way to self-knowledge. We can learn about ourselves, as human beings and as individuals, by reading, thinking through, and arguing about this distinctive kind of text. Reasoning with Edmund Gosse's Father and Son is a way of learning about the nature of the good life and the roles that pleasure and self-expression can play in it. Reasoning with Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs is a way of learning about transformative experience, self-alienation, and therefore the nature of the self. Good Lives: Autobiography, Self-Knowledge, Narrative, and Self-Realization develops this claim by answering a series of questions: What is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? On what subjects does autobiography teach? What should we learn about them? In particular, given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our storytelling about our own lives make sense of them as wholes, unify them over time, or make them good for us? Could storytelling make the self? Samuel Clark provides an authoritative critique of narrative and a defence of a self-realization account of the self and its good. He investigates the wide range of extant accounts of the self and of the good life, and defends pluralist realism about self-knowledge by reading and reasoning with autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude. The volume concludes by showing that autobiography can be reasoning in pursuit of self-knowledge; each of us is an unchosen, initially opaque, seedlike self; our good is the development and expression of our latent capacities, which is our individual self-realization; and self-narration plays much less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.