Reading Autobiography


Book Description

projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.




Interpreting the Self


Book Description

In this ambitious study, Diane Bjorklund explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. Bjorklund draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of self. "A refreshingly welcome approach to this intriguing topic. . . . [Bjorklund's] extensive and systematic approach to her source material is impressive and enriches our understanding of this essential subject."—Virginia Quarterly Review "Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self." —Library Journal




Stendhal


Book Description

Both critic and writer, Stendhal has now become established as one of realism's founding fathers. Dr Pearson's book maps out, for the first time, the critical reception of Stendhal's two most widely read novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma since their publication in 1830 and 1839 respectively. In part one he provides generous samples of the most important nineteenth-century responses to the novels, almost all of them translated into English for the first time. Part two presents a full range of the most authoritative and influential readings since 1945, which illustrate a wide variety of critical approaches.




Reading Autobiography Now


Book Description

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.




A Truffaut Notebook


Book Description

François Truffaut (1932-1984) ranks among the greatest film directors and has had a worldwide impact on filmmaking as a screenwriter, producer, film critic, and founding member of the French New Wave. His most celebrated films include The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Day for Night, and The Last Metro. A Truffaut Notebook is a lively and eclectic introduction to the life and work of this major cinematic figure. In entries as brief as a page, as well as in full-length essays, it examines topics such as Truffaut's mentors, the autobiographical nature of his films, his place in the film tradition, his film criticism, his reputation, his relationships with other directors, and the formal and thematic coherence of his body of work. Sam Solecki also argues for Truffaut's continuing appeal and relevance by examining his influence on filmmakers like Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Patrice Leconte, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and on writers such as Julian Barnes, Ann Beattie, and Salman Rushdie. Because the book returns regularly to the author's shifting responses to Truffaut's work over the last fifty years, it also offers an autobiographical meditation on his own lifelong fascination with film. Consisting of over eighty short entries and essays, as well as provocative lists, dreams, and quizzes, A Truffaut Notebook is an original and exciting text and a model of passionate engagement with cinema.




The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation


Book Description

"The Guide offers both an essential reference work for students of English and comparative literature and a stimulating overview of literary translation in English."--BOOK JACKET.




Precarious Visualities


Book Description

The transformation of our relation to images in contemporary visual culture.




The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel


Book Description

French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.




Forms of Life


Book Description

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination--the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities--emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life. Martin Price writes here about ways in which character has been conceived and presented in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with chapters that cogently argue the artistic value of character, Price then deals with the different forms character has taken in individual novels. His first discussions center on authors--Jane Austen, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy--who define individuals by their adherence or opposition to social norms. The next chapters deal with novelists for whom the moral world is largely internalized. The characters of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster live in society and act upon it, but the authors are particularly concerned with the confusions, terrors, and heroism that lie within consciousness. The last chapter uses novels about the artist by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann in order to apprehend the process by which experience is transformed into art. Avoiding both formalistic and moralistic extremes, this new book by a distinguished critic helps us recover a fuller sense of literary form and the forms of life from which it emerges.




General Catalogue of Printed Books


Book Description